Product Description Apprenticed to a printer in 1681 Boston, young Weetasket, renamed William, yearns to return to his Indian tribe and the companionship and love of his twin brother, Cancasset From School Library Journal Grade 7 Up. It's December, 1681, and an assortment of pompous masters and impudent servants lead different lives by day and night. Events are woven together through the story of a 14-year-old Narraganset Indian boy who is searching for threads of his past. Melodious writing, revealing images, and a colorful, outlandish cast characterize this unusual novel that revels in surprises. (May Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. SaturnaliaBy Paul FleischmanHarperCollins PublishersCopyright © 1990 Paul FleischmanAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780060219130Chapter OneThe Weathervanes Of Boston were pointed north -- the frigates, the angels, the cocks, the cows -- and so, below, was Mr. Baggot. Marching down a dim alleyway, he raised his eyes from the shin-deep snow and gazed with envy at a rooftop rooster. The wooden bird was perched high enough to be sunning itself in the first light of day. While he himself, mused Mr. Baggot, trudged along in perpetual darkness, walking, the lightless lanes of sin, rooting out evil and blasphemy. Such was the life of a tithingman.It was December of. 1681 and tombstone-cracking cold. Having bested fifty previous winters, Mr. Baggot was undeterred by the freezing gust of wind scouring his face and strode powerfully ahead without pause, parting the gale with his hatchet nose. In one hand he carried a wellworn copy of Spiritual Stepping-Stones for the Young. In the other he carried the symbol of hisoffice, a walnut staff knobbed at one end and bearing a fox's tail on the other. In fulfilling his duties at Sunday's church service, he'd banged the staff's knob on the doltish heads of a variety of squirming, whispering, laughing, face-making, Satan-claimed children, while waking no less than four dozing adults with a tickle of the foxtail. Following this, he'd used it to trip a pair of boys running from the meetinghouse, had reported two men for swearing and one for shamelessly splitting wood on the Sabbath, and yesterday, to his great disgust, had descended into the hellish waterfront taverns in search of disorderly patrons. How far this foul metropolis was from the paradise it had promised! A thought punctuated by the emptying, from above, of a chamber pot directly in his path.He turned onto King Street and nearly collided with a scissors grinder pushing his wheel. Tinkers, broom makers, fishwives, and wood sellers all sent their cries toward the roof of Heaven. Horses, carts, and rumbling wagons shook the Devil from bed below. Mr. Baggot tramped on, his cloak flappingin the breeze so that he seemed to be constantly changing shape, as if made of black quicksilver., In the distance he glimpsed a pair of ships, sails full, leaving Boston harbor. Closer at hand, he spotted a shop sign in the shape of a book, and girded himself.Like the town's other tithingmen, he had spiritual charge of ten families, noting with care their attendance at services and testing their chil dren's knowledge of Scripture. Among the homes on his circuit, none distressed him like that of Charles Currie, printer, a man of great knowledge who seemed to prefer the companionship of his books on Sundays to that of his neighbors in church. And among the young under Mr. Currie's roof, none irked him like William, the printer's apprentice. Not because the, boy failed to study, like most -- but because he knew far too much.Mr. Baggot, entered the printer's front room, causing the shop's bell to tinkle softly. Waiting for his presence to be noted, he sniffed breakfast, heard talking farther within, glanced about at the books, papers, pins, and other sundries for sale, coughed conspicuously, took off his cloak listened to an outburst of gener