THE PLAINS OF NAUSEf. 4i 
land Isles with a harpoon, and done with it. Think of 
a whale having the breath of life beaten out of him by 
a storm, and dragging in over the bars and guzzles, for 
the support of the ministry! What a consolation it 
must have been to him ! I have heard of a minister, 
who had been a fisherman, being settled in Bridgewater 
for as long a time as he could tell a cod from a haddock* 
Generous as it seems, this condition w^ould empty most 
country pulpits forthwith, for it is long since the fishers 
of men were fishermen. Also, a duty was put on mack¬ 
erel here to support a free-school; in other words, the 
mackerel-school was taxed in order that the children’s 
school might be free. “In 1665 the Court passed a 
law to inflict corporal punishment on all persons, who 
resided in the towns of this government, who denied the 
Scriptures.” Think of a man being whipped on a spring 
morning, till he was constrained to confess that the 
Scriptures were true ! “ It was also voted by the town, 
that all persons who should stand out of the meeting¬ 
house during the time of divine service should be set in 
the stocks.” It behooved such a town to see that sitting 
in the meeting-house was nothing akin to sitting in the 
stocks, lest the penalty of obedience to the law might be 
greater than that of disobedience. This was the East- 
ham famous of late years for its camp-meetings, held in 
a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts 
of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the 
perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the 
religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large por¬ 
tion of the population are women whose husbands and 
sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and 
there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind. 
The old account says that “ hysteric fits are very com- 
