The people of the early colonial settlements had a private and interior life, as much as we have now, and the people of all ages and countries have had.  It is common to regard them in no other light than as a severe, sombre, and pleasure-abhorring generation.  It was not so with them altogether.  They had the same nature that we have.  It was not all gloom and severity.  They had their recreations, amusements, gayeties, and frolics.  Youth was as buoyant with hope and gladness, love as warm and tender, mirth as natural to innocence, wit as sprightly, then as now.  There was as much poetry and romance:  the merry laugh enlivened the newly opened fields, and rang through the bordering woods as loud, jocund, and unrestrained as in these older and more crowded settlements.  It is true that their theology was austere, and their polity, in Church and State, stern; but, in their modes of life, there were some features which gave peculiar opportunity to exercise and gratify a love of social excitement of a pleasurable kind.  Let me mention some of the customs having a tendency in this direction, that prevailed in the early settlements of New England.

Whenever a young man had made his clearing in the forest, got out the frame of his house, and selected a helpmeet to dwell with him in it, there was “a raising.”  On an appointed day, the neighbors far and near assembled; all together put their shoulders to the work; and, before the shadows of night enveloped the scene, the house was up, and covered from sill to ridgepole.  The same was done if the house of a neighbor had been destroyed by fire.  In this case, often the timbers, joists, and boards were contributed as well as the labor.  These were made the occasions of general merriment, in which all ages and both sexes participated.  Then there were the “huskings.”  After the barns were filled with hay and grain, and the corn was ripe, at “harvest home,” gatherings would be seen on the bright autumnal afternoons of successive days, in the neighborhood of the different farmhouses.  The sheaves would be taken from the shocks and brought up from the fields, the golden leaves and milky tassels stripped from the full ear, and the crib filled to the brim.  These were scenes of unalloyed enjoyment and unrestrained gayety.

At that time were prevalent, in rural neighborhoods, other recreations promotive of social hilarity to the highest degree.  As a wintry evening drew on, the wide, deep fireplace—­equalling in width nearly the whole of one side of the room, and so deep that benches were permanently attached to the jambs, on which two or more could comfortably sit—­was duly prepared.  A huge log, of a diameter equal to that of “the mast of some great admiral,” six feet perhaps in length, was worked in by handspikes to its place as the “back-log;” a smaller one, as “back-stick,” placed over it; the great andirons duly adjusted, and the wood piled on artistically—­for there was an art in building a wood-fire.  The kindlings