self-restrained nature. He could not keep down a.queer sensation as he approached the rectory; and his hand shook as he held the reins while the driver got down to open the avenue gate.

It was hardly to be wondered at. He had come back to England with the heart of a philanthropist, and the affectionate nature of a boy; and he was about to renew personal acquaintance with two persons whom he had befriended, and rescued from the fate of outcasts years ago. He had left England, an outcast himself, and a pauper: he was now a wealthy man. "Misera est magni custodia censûs," says the satirist-How great care belongs to the possession of riches and when those riches are accumulated by the degradation of our fellow-men, how awful the responsibility! This responsibility cannot be shirked or evaded, my good sir, nor condoned by great gifts, which win for the donor, at no sacrifice of personal comfort-no curtailment of luxury-the name of a public benefactor. Worldly titles and much human exaltation may follow; but when the final balancing of accounts takes place, of what avail are such gifts from the overflowing exchequer of the millionaire, who may be at heart -and relatively to many a person who gives nothing-a miser? On the other hand, is it true, as has been asserted, that laudations of poverty come invariably from those who have never felt the pinch of want? Manifestly, an experience of both phases is needed before a correct estimate can be formed; and I am not in a position to be impartial.

You turn on me, and say it is all very well to moralise. Very likely I am not a whit better than you are, or than anybody

else is; but, all the same, my facts remain facts, and there are poor men richer than the millionaire. In the words of another pagan, it is great riches to subsist on little with content, for "est umquam penuria parvi "— of a little there is always plenty. I don't object to people being rich: personally I should rather like to be wealthy: I only protest against riches being called virtue and being treated accordingly. Church and State may applaud and pet you for the act of giving; but if you don't pinch or inconvenience yourself in any way whatever, you may pose as a philanthropist, but your donative investments, be they ever so large, won't "pay" in the Great Beyond. God is not mocked, I say-subject, of course, to the saving clause which modern thought demands-namely, that there be a God and a Great Beyond.

This is all suggested by what was passing through the mind of Adrian. As a moral tonic, a sort of penitential "pick-me-up" retrospect is good. He was a rich man, but his money had all been made by flocks and herds, and by honest hard work; and he had come home to make good use of it.

He was sure of a warm welcome at the rectory, and he got it. Such a commotion as there was when he arrived! The whole household had been on the tiptoe of expectation, and on the watch for several days. Georgie was the first to hear the sound of the approaching vehicle; and he was surrounded before he well knew where he was. Servants, dogs, Georgie's tom-cat, all joined in the general jubilation; and, in less time than it took to write, he ceased to be a stranger, or even a guest, and became "one of the family."

THE Pilgrim Fathers who landed in Plymouth Bay had fled from persecution, prerogative, and hereditary privilege. For a full generation the troubles in England left them a free hand. They could arrange a constitution for themselves and decide on their own forms of self-government. There was a reaction against all that savoured of feudal institutions, and the tyrannical influences of a high clerical caste in intimate relations with arbitrary monarchy. There was to be no aristocracy in State or Church. The men who made the voyage in the Mayflower were to establish the municipal institutions of a middle-class democracy which had emancipated itself from social superiorities, and was profoundly imbued with religious convictions. But though there were to be no social superiorities, the doctrine of universal equality was tempered by the personal interests of the primitive legislators and by shrewd common-sense. All men are equal, no doubt, was virtually the answer of one of them to an obnoxious socialist of the troublesome type, who would have pushed equality to its logical consequences. One man is undoubtedly as good as another, said this legislator, but one is good for one thing and another for another. Your work is in the forest or the field, mine is in the pulpit or the council-room. In fact, the bulk of the emigrating democracy found that they had only changed their masters. The ruling oligarchy stood no nonsense they made stringent laws, and were determined that the laws should be

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obeyed. In secular matters, and in a less degree in religion, that autocratic enforcing their authority was a question of self-preservation. Unity was essential, and dissensions would have been fatal. What was really a forlorn and indifferently equipped little band had attempted a doubtful or desperate venture. They were literally between the devil and the deep sea : for on the one side the woods and the swamps were swarming with warlike savages who were believed to be the protégés and instruments of Satan; on the other hand was the ocean which separated them from civilisation, and which might wreck the ships that were freighted with friends or stores. At first it was even a question whether the country could feed the settlers. They had landed in the depth of a severe winter-in the middle of December; they were appalled by the rigour of the climate; and, as we showed in a former article, it was a joyful discovery when they found that the Indians could successfully go in for spade-farming on a small scale, and had stored good wholesome grain they had grown in a forestclearing.

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The founders of what was really a little republic, although nominally a Crown colony, were men of resolution and men of iron. If somewhat hard upon others, they seldom spared themselves. They shirked neither danger nor responsibility. Through the first and second generations they were always to the front in explorations, beset with unknown perils, in fights, and in skirmishing expe

ditions against the Indian braves. They had exiled themselves for the sake of civil liberty, and still more for the sake of emancipation from galling ecclesiastical trammels. The lay chiefs, the ministers, and the rank and file, were alike profoundly religious. Fanatics or enthusiasts the more thoughtful and better educated may have been. Nor was it any wonder. They had learned to value the Faith and the Gospel pure and undefiled, for which they had suffered in England and sacrificed so much. In that new country, and amidst these savage surroundings, superstition soon obtained a stronger hold on a religion which had always been emotional and somewhat sentimental. In clinging fogs and under weeping skies, between the gloomy woodlands and the melancholy sea, they saw strange visions and dreamed wild dreams. Some of the most practical of them, unless they were shameless liars, which we do not for a moment believe, seem to have been doubtful, like the apostle of the Gentiles, whether, when in their trances, they were in the body or the spirit. We may presume that the nerves of not a few of the strongest were touched, and that they were affected by insidious forms of hysteria. Though it is very evident that -as was the case with more than one of Cromwell's most formidable lieutenants; we might even say with the great Protector himself their delusions affected neither their sanity nor their common-sense, nor made them deviate by a single hair-breadth from the direction of their far-sighted polity. Puritans as they were, they were likewise pantheists. They believed before all things in a personal Satan, and they peopled the wilds and wastes with malevolent familiars. The Satyr

of the Greek mythology had turned to the orthodox New England Satan with the hoofs and horns, and hairy extremities which popular folk-lore had latterly attributed to him.

But Satan, as he was not omnipotent, and might be combated successfully, could not be omnipresent. He had organised what we may call an infernal skeleton army to fight his battles with the elect in the Massachusetts spiritual militia. As we have said, he commissioned subordinate fiends on his staff to inspire the malig nant counsels of the savages. He sent minor devils to take possession of 'professing Christians, who had either strayed far from the path of grace, or who had been predestined from all eternity to demoniacal possession; and he had his flying light cavalry in the decrepit old witches, who, in defiance of dress and decorum, bestriding their broomsticks, winged their dusky flight through storm or moonshine, playing the mischief with the flocks and the hopes of the dairymaids.

These men were credulously superstitious, and so their sons continued to be down to at least the second quarter of the eighteenth century. But after all, and although circumstances had given their religion a more sinister cast, they were little behind their most enlightened contemporaries in Europe in the reign of the Scottish Solomon and his son the Royal Martyr. Witch-finding was recognised as an honourable profession, demanding genius or inspiration rather talent. And as lately as the year 1677, five unfortunates charged with witchcraft were sent to the stake at Paisley, on the uncorroborated evidence of a girl of weak intellect, both deaf and dumb.

than simple

We may say, indeed, that the honest and grave Pilgrim Fathers had put back the spiritual clock for a few thousand years. They totally ignored the New Testament and its teachings, and went back for their guidance to the Mosaic dispensation. Analogies in all respects were very close between the self-banished Puritans and the Hebrews of the Exodus. One and the other were a chosen people; one and the other were called out into the wilderness, and so forth. But the one and the other had their special mission, and, above all, both had their special covenant. Their mission, after nourishing themselves, their wives, and their little ones, was to exterminate, to subjugate, or to christianise the heathen aborigines. According to the covenant, the Lord of hosts would be on their side so long as they obeyed His commandments and observed the prescribed ritual. Keeping the covenant involved strict conformity to the law as promulgated and interpreted by its orthodox ministers; hence the ruthless persecution of the Quakers and other pestilent sectarians. As for the Mosaic ritual, that was simplified; but the burden of the attendance on the rites and the ceremonies and the interminable diets of public worship was made almost intolerable. The preacher in the pulpit had it all his own way, like the proverbial bull in the china shop; as Boswell said of one of Johnson's vigorous outbreaks, there was fine sport in the way of tossing and goring, although it became monotonous hour after hour and Sabbath after Sabbath. The heathenish Sunday was proscribed, but the day of the Christian resurrection was observed almost as rigidly as the Jewish Sabbath.

In fact, the preachers and the

grave and potent seniors, if they did not exactly compound for sins to which they had a mind, were unsparing in their condemnation of the temptations they had lived down, or the vices to which they had slight inclination. Hawthorne's 'Scarlet Letter' illustrates how little toleration they had for those amiable indiscretions which might sometimes be extenuated if not altogether excused. They dealt with the immorality which had been the scandal of their persecutors, the Cavaliers, with the zeal of Phinehas, who executed summary justice in face of the congregation on the fair Midianite and her high-born paramour. They held cards and dice in natural detestation, though in a community that was short of cash and leisure there were few inducements to gamble. Setting their faces against immorality in every shape was very well, but unfortunately they confounded innocent amusements with dissipation. Their young folks, although born and bred to the manner, must have had a melancholy time of it. They were driven to preaching and praying, like the oxen who were goaded along the holding furrows, and what should have been the day of recreative rest was made the most repulsive of all the seven. As on the Jewish Sabbath, the preparations began the day before, and when any hour of the Sabbath was without its stated duties, the intervals were to be devoted to yawning and doing nothing indefatigably. The bald and bare meeting-houses, run up in haste from ready materials, were the symbols of the chilling Transatlantic religion. The Fathers had left the stately cathedrals, the grand old abbeys, the humble village churches, hundreds of leagues, behind, as stoles and

surplices had been replaced by the black and scanty gown of Geneva. Yet intensely Mosaic and prosaic as they were, their advanced ideas, anticipating our latest legislation, must be remembered to their credit. Beside the meeting-house, and even in scattered and remote hamlets where no tabernacle had been raised, there stood the school - house. Frugal in their financing, for the best of reasons, they extended the advantages of elementary education to all, for they had come to the conclusion that the progress of the colony depended on the development of its intelligence. They were inconsistent, too, in another and less creditable respect. They denounced old English merrymaking as a snare of the devil, and actually committed themselves to one civil war, that they might lay the axe to the root of an obnoxious May - pole. But they encouraged camp meetings like their descendants; they permitted "quilting frolics," and tolerated nocturnal courting. So that really, in common justice, the ministers and ruling elders should have seated themselves on the stools of repentance, side by side with the backsliding Lotharios and the frail Marguerites who provoked the terrors of ecclesiastical thunders, and were pilloried to ignominy like Hester Prynne.

It is difficult to discuss that Puritanism of theirs altogether seriously. In their excessive precision and minute observances there is so much that passes the borders of the ridiculous; and though priding themselves with very good reason on founding a free republic upon. an enduring base, there is no deny ing their narrow-mindedness, their superstition, and their intolerance. But when all is said, we can only acknowledge that they accom

plished with very inadequate means one of the grandest works in the history of the world. We are bound to remember, when writing of their beginnings, that that was the day of small things, and to recall their circumstances, and how much they quickly achieved in the face of discouragements and the most formidable difficulties. They preached brotherly unity, and they practised it. The strong were always at the service of the weak; the richer were sharing their goods with the poor; and all classes were willing to participate in the sacrifices when it was a question of repelling the sav ages or promoting in any way the public weal. So in any article touching on the subject there must be a strange intermingling of the ludicrous and the terrible; of the grotesque, the grim, and the heroic.

There is the worthy Captain Roger Clapp, for example, who was born in Devon in 1609, and died in Boston after nearly seeing out the century. Giving the old country his recollections as an elderly man, he tells fondly how these Puritans had suffered and loved one another. He was not one of the first settlers; when he emigrated there were already some scattered townships. Even then he reports Massachusetts "a vacant wilderness in respect of English." He landed in a season of destitution, when provisions were hardly to be had for money. Trying as were the privations, he gratefully acknowledges the mercy of God in making them no worse.

'Many a time if I could have filled it would have been sweet to me. Fish my belly, though with mean victuals, was a good help unto me and others. times I thought the very crusts of Bread was so very scarce that somemy father's table would have been