_At the time of the beginning of the events about to be narrated--which
the reader is to be informed occurred between the years 1740 and 1742--
there stood upon the high and rugged crest of Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock Point
(or Pig and Sow Point, as it had come to be called) the wooden ruins of
a disused church, known throughout those parts as the Old Free Grace
Meeting-house._
_This humble edifice had been erected by a peculiar religious sect
calling themselves the Free Grace Believers, the radical tenet of whose
creed was a denial of the existence of such a place as Hell, and an
affirmation of the universal mercy of God, to the intent that all souls
should enjoy eternal happiness in the life to come._
_For this dangerous heresy the Free Grace Believers were expelled from
the Massachusetts Colony, and, after sundry peregrinations, settled at
last in the Providence Plantations, upon Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock Point,
coadjacent to the town of New Hope. There they built themselves a small
cluster of huts, and a church wherein to worship; and there for a while
they dwelt, earning a precarious livelihood from the ungenerous soil
upon which they had established themselves._
_As may be supposed, the presence of so strange a people was
entertained with no great degree of complaisance by the vicinage, and
at last an old deed granting Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock to Captain Isaiah
Applebody was revived by the heirs of that renowned Indian-fighter,
whereupon the Free Grace Believers were warned to leave their bleak and
rocky refuge for some other abiding-place. Accordingly, driven forth
into the world again, they embarked in the snow[1] "Good Companion," of
Bristol, for the Province of Pennsylvania, and were afterwards heard of
no more in those parts. Their vacated houses crumbled away into ruins,
and their church tottered to decay._
[Footnote 1: A two-masted square-rigged vessel.]
_So at the beginning of these events, upon the narrative of which the
author now invites the reader to embark together with himself._
I