PURITANISM IN CONNECTICUT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIB,—In your excellent article deprecating the attack upon the reredos in St. Paul's, you incidentally refer to the Puritans as having made it unlawful for a mother to kiss her child on Sunday. You surely do not believe that nonsense ! Do you not know that this is one of the distortions of Connecticut history, equally comical and malicious, contained in the book of the Rev. Samuel Peters, an Episcopalian clergyman of the last century, who, not being as highly regarded by his fellow- colonists as he thought that his merits demanded, took a direful revenge by publishing a book on the Blue Laws, which is said to contain this fiction about the mother kissing her child, with plenty more of the same complexion, equal in veraciousness to Diedrich Knickerbocker's legends, but greatly superior in maliousness ?
I may mention that this Rev. Samuel Peters is the same gentleman who gravely assured the wondering English that the waters of the Connecticut were so compressed between the rocks at Bellows. Falls, as to make it impossible to thrust a crowbar into them. I notice this same story in Professor Stokes's lectures on "Irish Church History." It is about as wonderful as some of the miracles of the Irish saints.—I am,
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