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CHAPTER IV.

THE LADY REBECCA, AND SOME OTHER WIVES.

HEN I think of the efforts to establish col

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onies in our country, I hear ringing in my ears certain lines of verse. I think again of little Virginia Dare breathing out her gentle young life and leaving her tender body to be buried beneath the sands of a Southern shore. With her vanishes the only representative of childhood in that day that I have heard of. Then it is that the air sings to me :

A dreary place would be this earth

Were there no little people in it;
The song of life would lose its mirth,
Were there no children to begin it.

The sterner souls would grow more stern,

Unfeeling natures more inhuman,

And man to stoic coldness turn,

And woman would be less than woman.

I remember that not only were there no children among the early Pathfinders, but, as I have told you, seldom did a woman trust herself in the little boats with which her husband or brother or lover embarked to find his fortune in the wondrous New World. It was accident that carried Anne Dorset

away from her English home. Love impelled Isabella Bovadilla to follow De Soto, and we may presume to say that the mother of Virginia Dare crossed the ocean from the same powerful motive. These were exceptions to the rule, and after Virginia Dare died, there were no women among the colonists for a long time. It is this fact which lends interest to the story of the Lady Rebecca and some other wives, that I am now to tell you. Perhaps I ought to speak of the other wives before the Lady Rebecca, but I shall not.

The most of my story relates to the fifteen years that followed the death of Queen Elizabeth; long and dreary years to Raleigh, who was pining in the Tower of London, where he had been confined by his jealous sovereign, King James, of whose reign he would otherwise have been one of the most

brilliant ornaments.

At the end of this tedious

imprisonment, in the year 1618, Raleigh's head was cut off by the executioner, and we may suppose that the king tried to make himself believe that he felt happier when he reflected that he had put out of the way one whom he feared as much as he should have honored him. It was not necessary for King James to emigrate to a childless world, as the verses suggest, that he should turn to stoic coldness; fear of a great subject and subserviency to a foreign king were powerful enough to embolden him to this heartless deed.

Treacherous and cruel as King James was to Raleigh, he was the one who gave the charters to the two companies that made permanent settlements in America. They were in Virginia and Massachusetts. It happened that the enterprising and intelligent men of England were obliged by circumstances to engage in establishing colonies in America. Among them was the. Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir John Popham. We find many persons bearing titles among those who, at about this time, turned their attention westward. Any

enterprise that is taken up by such people in England becomes popular, and we should not be surprised to be told that a great many men entered into the schemes for colonization with ardor, when Sir this and Lord that allowed it to be known that they were interested in them.

King James is the person to whom we owe the translation of the Bible that is still in general use, in spite of the fact that a new one has just been made which most scholars consider better. He is known in history as the Wise Fool, the Solomon of England, and by other titles of the same sort. The historian Macaulay says that he was two persons, a well-read scholar and a drivelling idiot; which is pretty strong language, but he did so many foolish acts that it does not seem too forcible. In the year 1606, he showed both sides of his character. A few months after the land had been stirred up by the famous Gunpowder Plot, the king issued the patent that led to the founding of British civilization in America, and it was so generous in its terms that we can hardly believe that it was not dictated to him by some one of his

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