There followed a long prayer, as usual. Then the children kissed their mother and Jenny and crept up to their chamber. The nine-o'clock bell had rung, and the streets were still. The watchman with his lantern went by, saying, "Nine o'clock, and all is well!" None of the family heard him say, "Ten o'clock, and all is well!" They were in slumberland after their hard, homely toil, and some of them may have been dreaming of the good old Governor, who followed literally the words of the Master who taught on the Mount of Beatitudes.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE TREASURE-FINDER.
Little Benjamin once had the boy fever to go to sea. This fever was a kind of nervous epidemic among the boys of the time, a disease of the imagination as it were. Many boys had it in Boston; they disappeared, and the town crier called out something like this:
"Hear ye!
Hear ye!
Boy lost—lost—lost!
Who returns him will be rewarded."
He rang the bell as he cried. The crier's was the first bell that was rung in Boston.
But why did boys have this peculiar fever in Boston and other New England towns at this time? It was largely owing to the stories that were told them. Few things affect the imagination of a boy like a story. De Foe's Robinson Crusoe was the live story of the times. Sindbad the sailor was not unknown.
Old sailors used to meet by the Town Pump and spin wonderful "yarns," as story-telling of the sea was then described.