In old Narragansett; romances and realities

by Alice Morse Earle

The story of Tuggie Bannocks’s fright and her revengeful “project” spread far and wide on every farm from Point Judith to Pottawomat, and was told in later years by one generation of farmers to another. And as time rolled on and Nanny reared her lambs and they her grand-lambs, the creeper sheep were known and sold throughout Narragansett by the name of witch-sheep.

THE CRUSOES OF THE NOON-HOUSE

In a grass-grown graveyard by the side of an old Presbyterian church in Narragansett, the warm, midday sun shone brightly down one spring Sabbath in the year 1760 upon two boys twelve years of age, two cousins, named Elam Noyes and Cotton Fayerweather. They stood by the side of their grandfather’s grave, which bore a new blue slate headstone, inscribed with his name and age, and the verses:

“You children of ye name of Noyes

Make Jesus Christ yo’r oleny choyse.”

The boys had gone into the church-yard with the apparent design of examining this fine, though misspelled, token of the stone-cutter’s art, but were really speaking and thinking of a very different subject. They would never have been allowed to wander in the church-yard to indulge in idle talk, and even now could spend but a few minutes in conversation together. It was their only meeting-time during the week, for they lived at extreme ends of the town, and Elam recited his lessons to the Baptist minister, who lived near him, while Cotton attended the village school. They were two well-built, healthy boys, both dressed in clumsy, homespun suits of clothes, with full knee-breeches, long-flapped coats and waistcoats, coarse yarn stockings and buckled shoes, and great gray beaver hats several sizes too large for them. Elam was as solemn and serious in his appearance as was his father, but in his brain was a current of keen romance rarely found in the head of any elderly colonist. As he left the church-yard with his cousin he said, with much impressiveness, “Remember, Cotton, if you are not here by candle-light I shall tarry no longer, but shall go home.”

For several Sundays, as the boys had walked among the graves, and while they had been busy with the care of their fathers’ horses, Elam had occupied every moment in telling to Cotton all that he could remember of a wonderful story he had read in New Haven. Two months previously he had ridden with his father to that town, and in the tap-room of the “ordinary” at which they had “put up” during their stay there had lain a pile of about forty books, which a sea-captain had left to be sold to any chance traveller, or to townspeople who might be inclined to purchase them. There were several copies of Tate and Brady’s new Psalms, which some of the New England Puritans wished to use instead of the loved old Bay Psalm-book, two or three Bibles, half a dozen volumes of sermons, a Dutch Psalm-book, which was not Dutch at all, but a collection of English songs and ballads, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” a few prayer-books, and then there was a wonderful book which Elam did not have time to finish, though he had not wasted a moment. It thrilled and filled him with adventurous longings, and was called “Robinson Crusoe.” This was the first and only story-book he had ever seen, and as he retold the wonderful tale to Cotton, the desire to run away out into the great world, to cross the ocean and see some strange sights and lead a different life from that on a Narragansett farm, grew strong in both boys’ breasts.

At last Elam, having a fertile though unexercised imagination, developed a plan of action. They would leave home and meet at the old meeting-house, where they would spend several weeks of idleness, roaming the woods by day and sleeping in the noon-house by night, and when everyone in town was tired of searching for them, then they would make their way to the sea-shore without fear of capture, and get on board a ship and sail off somewhere. They could hide in the wood on the Sabbath days, and as the meeting-house stood on a lonely road in a great wood on the top of a high hill, there would be but few passers-by on week-days, and hence few chances of discovery. And now I must explain about the noon-house, which was to be their sleeping-place, for none of those queer old buildings now exist in New England.

By the side of the barn-like church were three long, low, mean, stable-like log buildings, which could hardly be stables, since at one end of each hut was a rough stone chimney. These were noon-houses, or “Sabba-day houses.” One had been built by Elam and Cotton’s grandfather, and was used by the families of his children. Until the early years of this century, only two or three meeting-houses throughout New England contained stoves. All through the long, bleak, winter weeks, through fierce “nor’-westers” and piercing frosts, the lonely churches stood, growing colder and colder, until when they were opened upon the Sabbath the chill and damp seemed almost unbearable. The women brought to church little iron foot-stoves filled with hot coals. Upon these stoves they placed their feet, and around them the shivering children sat at their mothers’ feet and warmed their chilled hands. But by the time the long service was over—for often the minister preached two hours and prayed an hour, and some of the Psalms took half an hour to sing—you can easily see that the warmth would all have died out of the little foot-stove, and the mothers and children would be as cold as the fathers, which is saying a great deal.

Now these half-frozen Baptists and Puritans and Episcopalians could hardly have remained to attend an afternoon service and lived through it, so they built houses with chimneys and fireplaces near the church where they could go and make a fire and get warm and eat their lunch, and when they asked permission to put up such a building they said it was to “keep their duds and horses in.”