mon with the ladies of
the aristocratic circle, and there was no apparent reason for writing
extensively about them. But it should not be thought that they were
always rough, uncouth, enslaved creatures. The great majority were
decent women of the English rural class, able and willing to do hard
work, but unable to find it in England. Many of them, after serving
their time, married into respectable families, and in some instances
reared children who became men and women of considerable note. There can
be little doubt that while paying for their ship-fare they labored hard,
and sometimes were forced to mingle with the negroes and the lowest
class of white men in heavy toil. John Hammond, a Marylander, who had
great admiration for his adopted land, tried to ignore this point, but
the evidence is rather against him. Says he in his _Leah and Rachel_ of
1656:

"The Women are not (as reported) put into the ground to worke, but
occupie such domestique imployments and housewifery as in England, that
is dressing victuals, righting up the house, milking, imployed about
dayries, washing, sowing, etc., and both men and women have times of
recreations, as much or more than in any part of the world besides, yet
some wenches that are nasty, beastly and not fit to be so imployed are
put into the ground, for reason tells us, they must not at charge be
transported, and then maintained for nothing."

Of course among the lower rural classes not only of the South, but of
the Middle Colonies, a wedding was an occasion for much coarse joking,
horse-play, and rough hilarity, such as bride-stealing, carousing, and
hideous serenades with pans, kettles, and skillet lids. Especially was
this the case among the farming class of Connecticut, where the marriage
festivities frequently closed with damages both to person and to
property.

_X. Romance in Marriage_

Perhaps to the modern woman the colonial marriage, with its fixed rules
of courtship, the permission to court, the signed contract and the
dowry, seems decidedly commonplace and unromantic; but, after all, this
is not a true conclusion. The colonists loved as ardently as ever men
and women have, and they found as much joy, and doubtless of as lasting
a kind, in the union, as we moderns find. Many bits of proof might be
cited. Hear, for instance, how Benedict Arnold proposed to his beloved
Peggy:

"Dear Madam: Twenty times have I taken up my pen to write to you,
and as often