the Hill, for it is recorded without signs of the joy exhibited in the freedom of Philips.

In the years 1782-3 the final act in emancipating the local slaves was taken, in the investigation by a committee of the Meeting into the condition of the freed slaves, and the obligations of their old masters to them. It was not very cordially received at first, but in the third year of the life and labors of the committee it was reported by them that "the negroes appear to be satisfied without further settlement." So the first American community to free herself from slavery required but sixteen years of agitation fully to complete the process.

CHAPTER V.

AMUSEMENTS IN THE QUAKER COMMUNITY.

The Quaker community had little time for amusements, and less patience. The discipline of the Meeting levelled its guns at the play spirit, and for a century men were threatened, visited, disowned if necessary, for "going to frollicks," and "going to places of amusement." The Meeting House records leave no room for doubt as to the opinion held by the Society of Friends upon the matter of play.

An account is given elsewhere of the discipline of the Meeting in its struggle against immorality and "frollicking." The following quotation from James Woods' "The Purchase Meeting," vividly depicts the confused elements of the social life of that time: "On great occasions such as the holding of a Quarterly Meeting, the population turned out en masse. Piety and worldliness both observed the day. The latter class gathered about the meeting house, had wrestling matches and various athletic sports in the neighboring fields, and horse races on the adjacent roads. The meetings regularly appointed committees as a police force to keep order about the meeting house during the time of worship and business."

The stories told by old Quaker Hill residents of the gatherings about the meeting house, even on First Day, or Sunday, confirm the above quotation. The field opposite the meeting house, for years after 1769, when the earliest meeting house was moved away from that site, was used as a burial ground, and later, no headstones being placed in those early days, as a space for tethering horses. An old resident tells me that crowds of men were always about the meeting house before and after meeting, and even during meeting, and that in later years the resident of Site No. 32, who owned valuable horses, used to exhibit a blooded stallion on a tether, leading him up and down to the admiration of the horse-owners present, and to their probable interest.

These conditions seem to have continued through that whole century. The play spirit had no permitted or authorized occasions. It had to exercise itself with the other instincts, in the common gatherings. It was, as far as we can see, a time of asceticism. Men were forbidden rather than invited, in those days.

The Meeting not only provided no play opportunities, but it forbade the attendance of its members upon the "frollicks," which then were held, as nowadays they are held, in the country side. A gathering with plenty to eat, and in those days a free indulgence in drink on the part of the men, with music of the fiddler, and dancing, this was a "frollick"—that horror of the meeting house elders. Indeed, it was of incidental moral detriment; for it was outlawed amusement, and being under the ban, was controlled by men beyond the influence or control of the meeting. The young people of the Quaker families, and sometimes their elders, yielded to the fascinations of these gatherings. The unwonted excitement of meeting, the sound of music, playing upon the capacity for motor reactions in a people living and laboring outdoors, inflamed beyond control by rum and hard cider, soon led to lively, impulsive activities and physical exertions, both in immoderate excess and in disregard of all the inhibitions of tradition and of conscience. That there was a close relation of these "frollicks" with the sexual immorality of the period is probable.

Of more concern to us here is the observation, which is made with caution, that the attitude of the community to amusements was not conducive to moral betterment, because amusement was not specialized. The repression of the play spirit, offering it no occasions, recognizing no times and places as appropriate for it, disturbed the equilibrium of life, forced the normal animal spirits of the population to impulsive and explosive expressions and deprived them of the regulative control of the community.

It is probable that that early period had modes of amusement the record of which is wholly lost. There are few sources existing to inform us of the amusements of laboring classes. Hints occur in such records as that of the sale of powder and shot, of fishhooks and a quart of rum, at the Merritt store, in 1771, to the Vaughns. Seven years later the Vaughns were the Tory "cowboys," who robbed the defenceless neighborhood, until their leader was killed by Captain Pearce, during the Revolution.

It is probable that then the community wore the aspect which now it wears, of industry without play; and that members went elsewhere for their amusement, the acknowledged leaders in which were resident in other neighborhoods and communities.

The recreation of the body of working population of the Hill was incidental to the religious assemblies. In these meetings they took an intense and a very human pleasure. Their solitary, outdoor labor was performed in an intense atmosphere of communal interaction. He who raised hogs was to sell them, not to a distant market, but to Daniel Merritt, or John Toffey, the storekeepers. He who made shoes went from house to house, full of news, always talking, always hearing. He who wove heard not his creaking loom, but the voice of the storekeeper or of the neighbor to whom he would sell. The cheeses a woman pressed and wiped in a morning were to be sold, not far away to persons unseen, but to neighbors known, whose tastes were nicely ascertained and regarded.

The result was that meetings on First Day and Fourth Day were times of intense pleasure, occasions of all-around interest: not mere business interest, but incidentally a large satisfaction of the play instinct, especially for the working and mature persons. The young, too, had their happiness and enjoyment of one another in a multitude of ways, in addition to those boisterous games described above by Mr. James Wood. Their intense friendships and lively enterprises were probably not so easy to confine to the bounds of sober, staid meetings, but no less did their merry good spirits fill those assemblies. The galleries of the old Meeting House were built in 1800 for the young, who were expected to sit there during meeting. The wooden curtains between the "men's part" and the "women's part" are especially thorough in their exclusion of even an eyeshot from one side to the other.