Ye Lyttle Salem Maide

Over two centuries ago a little Puritan maiden might have been seen passing along the Indian path which led from out Salem Town to her home. It was near the close of day. The solemn twilight of the great primeval forest was beginning to fall. But the little maid tripped lightly on, unawed, untroubled. From underneath her snowy linen cap, with its stiffly starched ear-flaps, hung the braid of her hair, several shades more golden than the hue of her gown. Over one arm she carried her woolen stockings and buckled shoon. A man, seated near the path on the trunk of a fallen tree of such gigantic girth that his feet swung off the ground, although he was a person of no inconsiderable size, hailed her as she neared him. «Where do you wend your way in such hasty fashion, little mistress?» She paused and bobbed him a very fine courtesy, such as she had been taught in the Dame School, judging him to be an important personage by reason of his sword with its jeweled hilt and his plumed hat. «I be sorely hungered, good sir,» she replied, «and I ken that Goody Higgins has a bowl o' porridge piping hot for me in the chimney-corner.» Her dimpled face grew grave; her eyelids fell. «When one for a grievous sin,» she added humbly, «has stood from early morn till set o' sun on a block o' wood beside the town-pump, and has had naught to eat in all that time, one hungers much.»