Undeterred by these many rebuffs, as she grew cold he waxed warm, and a most lover-like and gallant scene ensued which would have done credit to a younger man than the Judge. Here it is in his own words:

Naturally these warm words had a marked effect she relaxed, drank a glass of wine with him, and I trust gave him a Canary-sweet kiss, and sent a servant home with him with a lantern.

The next visit the wind blew cold again. He had had one experience with a short-lived wife, and he had determined that should his next wife die he would still have some positive benefit from having married her. Hence he kept pressing Madam Winthrop in a most unpleasant and ghoulish manner to know what she would give him in case she died. He would allow her but one hundred pounds per annum. She in turn persisted in questioning him about the property he had given to his children; and she wished him to agree to keep a coach (which he could well afford to do), and she wanted it set on springs too. He said he could not do it while he paid his debts. She also suggested that he should wear a wig. This annoyed him beyond measure, for he hated with extreme Puritan intenseness those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," and the suggestion from his would-be bride was irritating in the extreme. He answered her with much self-control:

Still, when nearly all the men of dignity and position in the colony wore imposing stately wigs, no woman would be pleased to have a lover come a-courting in a hood.

So, though she gave him "drams of Black Cherry Brandy" and Canary to drink and comfits and lump sugar to eat, while he so pressed her to name her settlement on him, and while the wig and coach questions were so adversely met, she would not answer yes, and he regretted making more haste than good speed. At last the lover of the "kisses sweeter than Canary" critically notes that his mistress has not on "Clean Linen;" and the next day he writes rather sourly, "I did not bid her draw off her Glove as sometime I had done. Her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been;" the beginning of the end was plainly come. That week he forbade her being invited to a family dinner, and she in turn gave a "treat" from which he was excluded. Thus ended his fourth wooing.

The next widow on whom he called was widow