Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/294

278 temper would allow. Such misfortunes waited only on the humbler members of the community, who appear to have been sufficiently quarrelsome and excitable to furnish more occupiers of both pillory and stocks, than the religious character of the settlement would seem to admit, and who came to blows on the least provocation, using their fists with genuine English ardor, and submitting to punishment with composure, if only the adversary showed bruises enough for compensation. Wine and beer flowed freely at both the marriages, as they did at every entertainment, but Governor Bradstreet, while having due liking for all good cheer, was personally so abstinent that none would be likely in his presence to forget proper bounds. Ministers and laymen alike drank an amount impossible to these later days, and that if taken now would set them down as hopeless reprobates; but custom sanctioned it, though many had already found that the different climate rendered such indulgence much more hazardous than the less exhilarating one of England.

As the family lessened, the mother seems to have clung even more closely to those that remained, and to have lost herself in work for and with them. Whatever may have been written at this time, appears to have been destroyed, nothing remaining but the poem "Contemplations," which is more truly poetry than any of its more labored predecessors, its descriptive passages holding much of the charm of the lovely landscape through which she moved to the river, flowing still through the Andover meadows.