The same enactment includoil a rigid fugitive slave law and conuuanded all constables and inferior oHicers '• to prejw men. horses, boats or pinnaces to pnmie" runaway slaves "by sea or land, and to make diligent hue and cry, as by the law rcijuired." Later statutes pennitted masters to puu'sh al>Te6 with any chastisement nut extending to life or member ; forblde the assemblage of more than three slaves ; ordered that the children of slave women shall be slaves: that each town or manor may have k whipper of slaves ; that any slave presuming to strike any Christian or Jew shall be committed to prison and suffer corporal punishment ; forbide the harboring of slaves; provided that every nui-ster or the •X«cat«<r of a will freeing a slave must give two hundred iwunds Mcurity that such slave shall not become a public charge, and that the owners of slaves executoil for murder, arson or other terrible crime.s •hall be paiil for them. The trafTic in flaves l)egiin to ilecline in 1718, ■lldinlT2-t there were but six thousand one hundred and seventy-one in the province. In 1755 there were but seventy-three held in West-

Island in ItiiiS, and at Budd's Neck, with all due formality, as late as 1768. In a dispute between Samuel Odell and the heirs of Jonathan Vowles about the southernmost part of that island, John Frost testified that in 1()93 he went, by request of Vowles, to the said island, " where he did see Jonathan Vowles . . . cut a turff upon the same, as also cut a stick or twigg thereon ; and the said Jonathan Vowles did then and there deliver the said turfe and twigg to the said Samuel Odel, who tiesiretl this deponent to take notice that Jonathan Vowles did putt him in full and peaceable possession." The life of the early settlers was marked by simrhester County.