persons; we must obtain a view of the popular customs and the daily
routine of life. In this way only can history fulfil its office in
making the past present.

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,