From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of traveling gazette, carrying the budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History New England Witchcraft, in which , by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.