1630.

Persecution of the Puritans.

109

minor poems, and filling his mind with the learning of the ancients. The men had come, and the hour was at hand.

should not leave the kingdom without the king's permission. Eight ships lay in the Thames, with their passengers on board, when that order was given forth. The soldiers cleared the ships, and the poor emigrants were driven back, in poverty and despair, to endure the misery from which they were so eager to escape.

New England was the refuge to which the wearied victims of this senseless tyranny looked. The Pilgrims wrote to their friends at home, and every letter was regarded with the interest due to a "sacred script." They had hardships to tell of at first; then they had prosperity and comfort; always they had liberty. New England seemed a paradise to men who were denied permission to worship God according to the manner which they deemed right. Every summer a few ships were freighted for the settlements. Many of the silenced

ministers came. Many of their congregations came, glad to be free, at whatever sacrifice, from the tyranny which disgraced their native land.

The region around New Plymouth became too narrow for the population. From time to time a little party would go forth, with a minister at its head. With wives and children and baggage they crept slowly through the swampy forest. By a week or two of tedious journeying they reached some point which pleased their fancy, or to which they judged that Providence had sent them. There they built their little town, with its wooden huts, its palisade, its fort, on which one or two guns were ultimately mounted. Thus were founded many of the cities of New England.

For some years the difficulties which the colonists encountered were almost overwhelming. There seemed at times even to be danger that death by starvation would end the whole enterprise. At one time the amount of food was limited to five kernels of corn to each person for one day. But they were a stout-hearted, patient, industrious people, and labor gradually brought comfort. The virgin soil began to yield them abundant harvests. They fished with such success that they manured their fields with the harvest of the sea. They spun and they wove. They felled the timber of their boundless forests. They built ships, and sent away to foreign countries the timber, the fish, the furs which were not required at home. Ere many years a ship built in Massachusetts sailed for London, followed by "many prayers of the churches." Their infant commerce was not without its troubles. They had little or no coin. Indian corn was made a legal tender. Bullets were legalized in room of the farthings which, with their other coins, had vanished to pay for foreign goods. But no difficulty could long resist their steady, undismayed labor.

They were a noble people who had thus begun to strike