«
    »Be quiet, Pearl! Thou understandest not these things,« said her mother.
»Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is every
body's face to-day. The children have come from their schools, and the grown
people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy. For,
to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so - as has been the
custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered - they make merry and
rejoice; as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old
world!«
    It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the
faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was,
and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human
infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of
a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.
    But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market- of
Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native
Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear
to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever
witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers
would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets,
pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the
observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with
solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the
great robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There was some
shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which
the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in
proud old London, - we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's
show, - might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with
reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of
the commonwealth - the statesman, the priest