It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people
being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the
offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day),
that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping,
with their descendants, even at so long an interval as
ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so
darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent
years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its
general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English
emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party
of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered
deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and
feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed
spear--stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as
were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of
the scene.
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