might be compromised; he would will it all to his two faithful sons-in-law. He would prove his steadfastness. He made a will, perfect in every part, giving his property to the sons-in-law, and then totally refused to plead and was slowly pressed to death.1 The constancy of the old man did much to overthrow the partisans of witchcraft. Joseph Putnam, a young man of twenty-two, declared his detestation of the doctrine. He kept some one of his horses bridled and saddled for six months. He armed all his family, and it was understood that he must be taken, if taken at all, pistol in hand. When the mania was at its height he refused to have his child baptized in the village, but carried it to Salem.

The excitement had risen with every arrest. More than fifty badgered souls had confessed that they were witches. Some had fled the country. But the wide extent of the accusations produced a change in the minds of the people. They knew not who would be struck at next. The governor at length refused to call the special court together, and after a tedious confinement a hundred and fifty were released by proclamation. The population of Salem had decreased, its business had suffered, and perhaps it never recovered its prosperity. Slowly the people got over the delusion and came to realize the incalculable and irretrievable harm that had been wrought. Judge Sewall, at a general fast, handed up to the minister to be read a humble confession, and stood while it was read. He annually kept a private day of humiliation. Honor to his memory! The twelve jurymen also signed an affecting paper asking to be

1 By the English law, if a man were condemned of a crime like witchcraft, his personal property was confiscated. But sentence of condemnation would not be pronounced against him until he had pleaded guilty or not guilty. If he refused to plead, he was put under heavy weights until he either gave way and pleaded or was crushed to death. If a man remained steadfast to the death in his refusal, he saved his property from confiscation; for as he had not pleaded, he had not been tried and could not be condemned.

forgiven. Cotton Mather, who had been very conspicuous and had published a book about it, never acknowledged himself wrong in this or any other matter. From the time it became unpopular he speaks of the witchcraft trials in a far-away manner, as if they were wholly the work of someone else. He was never forgiven, and probably never ought to have been.

The revulsion was complete. No witches were tried or hanged or "swimmed" in America after the Salem trials. In half a lifetime more the ardor of the English people visibly abated, and few witches were thereafter arrested in England.

Edward Eggleston: The Transit of Civilization, pp. 25-34.

QUESTIONS

Illustrate the belief in the supernatural in New England: (a) as to elves and brownies (b) as to demonic possession. What would we call the latter to-day? What use did the ministers try to make of cases of witchcraft? What in the life of Salem in 1692 made the witchcraft delusion possible? How did the mania start? What sorts of tales of witchcraft were told? State some of the grounds on which people were condemned. What was the end of the delusion?

VII

COLONIAL SCHOOLS AND A COLONIAL

COLLEGE

By comparison of such notices as we have of American schools with the English schools of the period, we can form a fairly clear conception of the outward traits of school life in the age of American settlement. We may dimly see the unwilling boy " with shining morning face and a lambskin satchel setting out for school, breakfastless, in the dark winter mornings in time to begin his studies at the unchristian hour of six o'clock. Some schools postponed the hour of beginning until seven. The

session ended at eleven, when the famished pupils went home to their first meal, though in a few schools there was a recess of fifteen minutes at nine o'clock in order that those who lived near the school might snatch a hurried breakfast, a meal not generally reckoned with at that time. There was a custom in earlier times of allowing the fasting pupils to take some light food in school with bottles of drink, but if the custom survived into the seventeenth century it left no trace in educational literature. The session was resumed for the afternoon when the master rapped on the doorpost at one o'clock, and it continued. until "well-nigh six at night," when the scholars, who must have been stupefied by an all-day confinement, heard the welcome word of dismission, "Exeatis." In a new country the rough roads and long distances must have made it next to impossible to begin in the dark at six in the winter. By 1719 the hour had fallen away in one place to "three quarters past seven." One finds the pupils of Christopher Dock, the Pennsylvania Dutch teacher, munching their "breakfast bread" along the road as they hurried to school at some unearthly time, and back-country schools in America retained cruelly long hours, with other cherished and venerable abuses brought from Europe, until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early years of Harvard an hour was allowed at some time in the middle of the forenoon for morning bever, a light snack preceded by no breakfast. Half an hour was given to the afternoon bever, and an hour and a half each to dinner and supper. Small allowance was made for the activity of youth. There were no regular recesses for play in any of the schools. On occasion a great man would lend his countenance to the school by a formal visit; at such a time he might crave a little grace for the prisoners of learning; a half holiday was granted at his request and in honor of his advent. Such playtimes were of old called "remedyes," but austere Dean Colet would not allow to the pupils of his new foundation of St. Paul's a playday at the re

quest of anybody less than a king or a prelate. It was thought best to cut off this ancient privilege wholly at the little Virginia college; there were probably too many visitors of distinction; but one afternoon a month was set apart for play, and whenever a new student was enrolled “an afternoon extraordinary" was granted, “and no more.” . .

After the Restoration, Virginia began to feel an alarm like that which had startled Massachusetts earlier. It is probable that the deprived churchmen who occupied Virginia parishes during the Commonwealth were now returning to England to reap the reward of their fidelity to the king. It was feared that the "want of able & faithful Ministers" would deprive the colonists of “those great Blessings and Mercies that all waies attend upon the Service of God," and the Assembly passed an act in 1661, and again in 1662, to found “a colledge and free schoole.” But Sir William Berkeley, the governor, did not want either a college or a free school, and Berkeley, with a salary independent of the good will of the people, was more absolute in Virginia than his master Charles was in England. This pinchbeck Stuart detested ministers who were able to preach, and he abhorred printing presses. But the Virginia educational movement at the time of the Restoration was not wholly without result. If the proposed subscription for the college was ever taken, it probably was not collected, and the “houseing" ordered to be erected for the college is not again heard of. But at least two bequests to found new free schools were made in Berkeley's depressing reign. After the disorders and despotisms which followed the failure of Nathaniel Bacon's bold stroke for freedom in 1676 had passed away, a college subscription was set on foot in 1688 and 1689, and sums amounting to twenty-five hundred pounds were promised by wealthy Virginians and a few English merchants. The confusion resulting from the English Revolution of 1688

probably caused delay. Two years more elapsed before the Assembly took action by ordaining an institution in three departments—a grammar school, a school of philosophy, and a school of Oriental languages and divinity. A charter was secured from the sovereigns. William and Mary, whose names the college took, gave freely out of the wild lands of the province, out of the royal revenues from tobacco, and gave outright the income from the fees for surveying land. The Virginia Assembly added an import duty on furs. In 1700, while the building designed by Sir Christopher Wren was yet unfinished, the college at the close of its first year held a commencement. The novelty of such an exercise attracted a large concourse of people to the new town of Williamsburg. Some of the great planters came in coaches, which vehicles were yet rare enough in America to be noticeable. Other visitors. arrived in their own sloops, sailing in some instances from the upper waters of the Chesapeake, and in other cases on the open ocean from Pennsylvania and New York. Some even of the Indians gathered their blankets round them and strolled into the little capital to lend picturesqueness to this powwow of white men. The opening of an infant college was a notable break in the rather eventless monotony of a half-settled coast, remote from the great world.

The so-called college, thus hopefully launched, drifted inevitably into the whirlpools and eddies of petty provincial politics; its revenues were a tempting bait to the ring of predatory colonial magnates and ambitious sycophants that surrounded a royal governor in that day. William and Mary College was but a grammar school for years after its start, and its development was tediously slow. But most of its resources were saved from plunder and waste, and at the outbreak of the Revolution it was said to be the richest institution of learning in America.

Edward Eggleston: The Transit of Civilization, pp. 239, 249.