Excerpt from Tales of the Puritans: The Regicides; The Fair Pilgrim; Castine IT was a bitter afternoon in December, the air was intensely keen and piercing, the snow had indeed at length ceased falling, but the heavens looked drear and wintry. The ponds in the village of G were all frozen, not with that thin and glassy coating the first ray of sunshine dissolves; a smooth and substantial sur face now bore the buoyant tread of the skaters. A finer snow fall had not been known in the sea son, the solid and beautiful substance lay in glit tering expanse, on gardens and meadows, hills and dales, loading the trees with a new and fea thery foliage, and covering as with a mantle, eve ry deformity of the relentless season. It was now four o'clock, as was evident from the appearance of the common, in the centre of the village, thronged with children who were rushing delightedly from the walls of their lite rary prison. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.