YANKEE FOLK

Mitchell is at his best in rounding up eccentric bits about New England, and somehow he has not yet exhausted its riches. Stories, anecdotes, tidbits of unusual history, biographical sidelights on its famous, infamous and relatively unknown characters -- all will appeal to New England fans and Mitchell followers. Here are early printers and publishers, astronomers and telescope manufacturers, preachers and deacons, crimes and punishments, boy mathematical wizards, medical student grave robbers, pirates, whalers, hermits, witches, scoundrels, tinkers and inventors, a motley collection, drawn chiefly from the 17th and 18th century.