It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole (the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety.
当时的居民还是第一代没有欢乐活动的人,而且又是那些活着时深诸如何行乐曲父辈们的直接后裔,就过节这一点而论,比起他们的子孙,乃至相隔甚久的我们这些人,算是懂得快活的了,我们作这种一般性的结论,恐怕并不过分。早期移民的子嗣,也就是他们的下一代后人,受清教主义阴影笼罩最深,从而使国家的形象黯淡无光,以致在随后的多年中都不足以清洗干净。我们只好重新学习这门忘却已久的寻欢作乐曲本领。
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad grey, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians- in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear- stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners-a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main- who had come ashoreto see the humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensityof beard; their wide, short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and, in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all others; smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing, at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket-flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredationson the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.
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