Our nimble little Æsop now reappeared, bearing a dish of deulchatz, a most excellent preserve, which he offered me with numerous and profound bows. I swallowed but a spoonful, as you may well suppose. The bayache spread over me a pechtewal, or silk coverlid, surrounded me with soft pillows, replaced my first turban with another of linen, called a largue, and nursed me as tenderly as if I was suffering from gout. He then withdrew courteously, recommending me to sleep, which was an entirely superfluous advice. "Well," said my friend, after an hour of the most profound slumber, "how do you feel?" "Indeed," 1 replied, panting, "these baths are by no means as bad as might be imagined; my spine is still sound." Our dwarf again appeared, this time with two long lighted chiboques. We smoked and prepared to depart. I can give you no idea of the agreeable sensations which diffused themselves through my entire frame-the elasticity of my limbs-the vigor of my nerves. I was full of courage, and ready to fight with Hercules. And what do you suppose was the whole expense of all the boiling, roasting, beating, kicking, sleeping, smoking, &c., through which we had passed?— just one zwantzig, less than a shilling!" "York Thus have I introduced you, in my desultory way, to the life of the Bucharian Mahalas, the festivities of the upper class, and the beatitudes of the bath. Enough for the present. Au revoir. LOVE AND CHANGE. THE CLOUD. LOVE stood before me in my youth's fresh prime. "Life's hill is steep," he said; "the way is long; Be Love thy guide! Love's heart is bold and strong, Love's truth triumphant over Death and Time." And dark, behind him, lower'd the shadow, Change. That sterner voice was Truth's, for now I know Change followeth Love wherever he doth go. I could not lift that pall-my heart was full, Mine eyes o'erflow'd-Life's glory seem'd to grow A shadowy semblance and a mocking show; Thou hast undone me with thy witcheries. With that "forever" which the seraphs sing. RESIGNATION. The river flow'd in music to the sea, A GREAT MAN is, in fact, the instrument of Divine providence. Hence all great men haye been, more or less, fatalists. The error is in the form, not in the substance of the thought. They are conscious of immense power, and, not being able to attribute its possession to any merit of their own, they attribute it to a superior power, whose instruments they are, and which makes use of them for its own ends.-V. Cousin. A PLYMOUTH, THE PILGRIMS AND PURITANS. BY ALICE CAREY. GOOD name is no mean inheritancefor, strive as we will, we are not able to separate ourselves from the glory or shame of our ancestors; but while not insensible to "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," prized so highly by our transatlantic cotemporaries, we, Americans, are well content to forego the tracing of lineage at that great landmark of liberty, Plymouth Rock.* AVERT The Pilgrim Fathers! What bravehearted and great-hearted pioneers those words conjure up! Hardly a pulse is there among their millions of descendants, now speaking one language, and carrying a liberal literature to the farthest parts of the world, that does not thrill at the mention of those words. Thoroughly grounded in the right, as they understood it, they were reliable as the rock on which they first planted their feet, and, like it, unyielding. Pious, even to austerity, they fetched out of their own souls, which were, in fact, set on edge with zeal for God, the intolerance which ended in persecution. Not by the larger light which has come into the world since their day must we judge them, but rather by their own standards; and thus judging, we trace their hardest dealings to personal sanctity, and are ready to say "Even their failings lean'd to virtue's side." Pilgrims we may well call those heroic refugees, who, leaving not only native homes, but what seemed to them all the world, planted themselves in the wilderness, believing that in its awful and solemn shadows God could hear them and Gabriel could find them. In the legends of romance, or the chronicles of history, no event, perhaps, takes precedence of their curious emigration for singularity of origin or pregnancy of result. It is estimated that only about one-third of our present European population is of Puritan origin, It is believed that a condensation of the history of this handfull of sectaries who, in the frail little May-Flower, landed on our shores in 1620, and of the Puritans, shortly following, will not be found uninteresting to a majority of readers; for it is only with a few great facts of their history that most of us are familiar. We are all ready at once to throw over them a mantle of pride and veneration, long enough and broad enough to cover whipping-posts, ducking-stools, witch trials, hanging ropes and all, without stopping to inquire into details. Unlike our Puritan ancestors, we have become a race of dreamers and reliers upon hearsay-they knew things, and never doubted that they knew; having once fixed a standard there was no question about its perfection, and wo to the dissenter who was too long or too short for its measurement-there was no way but that he must be stretched out, or cramped down to fit it. The name Puritan was bestowed in derision, by adherents of the Church of England, on a little band of dissenters, on account of their profession of superior piety-of following the pure word of God in opposition to all traditions and human institutions. The Puritans, on the accession of Elizabeth, resolved to extirpate the last vestige of popery from the English Church, and introduce the practices of the continental reformers. And here began a struggle between those entrenched in the high places of the Church, and maintaining the royal supremacy, and the lesser and more reformatory party. Both were alike con scientious, and alike prepared to endure or to inflict punishment, even to death, if thereby their opponents might be silenced. The high Church party had the advantage of numbers and of entrenchment in royal favor; but the Puritans had an indomitable firmness, and a scathing zeal, which enabled them to dare their prelatist foes, and set themselves as one against a thousand. were some men and women, who received their principles from the Pilgrim martyrs, and "seasoned with the seeds of grace and virtue." There a solid groundwork received them, and the greatest commonwealth which the world has ever known was established, but not without the encounter of new difficulties. and they being without habitations, and having among them divers women and children, no marvel if they lost some of their company; it may be wondered how they saved the rest." "After having passed over the difficulties that usually encounter new planters, (says the same author,) they began to subsist in a reasonably comfortable manner, and after a year's experience or two of the soil and inhabitants, sent home tidings of their well-being there, which occasioned other men to take knowledge of the place, and to take it into consideration." Formidable enough was the aspect of things to those weary men and women Fines, prisons, and death, were the porcome to seek shelter and repose. "The tions of the Puritans during the reign of ground (I quote from White's Brief RelaElizabeth. James had been educated ation) was covered with snow a foot deep, Presbyterian, and had written in defense of the doctrine, and the Puritans expected toleration, at least, from his ascendency of the throne; but they were destined to disappointment. He had suffered at the hands of both Puritans and Presbyterians, and hated both alike—he saw the principles of Knox and Calvin tended to republicanism, and that the bishops were allied to monarchy. The Puritans became Separatists, assuming, day by day, a gloomier and more austere demeanor, and receding in politics as well as religion further and further from the Established Church. At length the Separatists began to contend It is hard for us to estimate the "deep for larger liberties-the power of appoint- and bitter concern" it must have cost our ing their own officers, and performing all conscientious ancestors to leave their ironthe functions of self-government with ab- bound wains and yokes of oxen, friends solute independence of all foreign control. and kindred; everything but rectitude, and Worn with toil and suffering, a society faith in God-that was best and dearest to composed of artisans, whose names are them and especially with no prospect of still preserved in authentic documents, met bettering their condition in anything but toward the close of the sixteenth century, religious liberty. So far from amendment, in the house of one Roger Ripon, in South- they had prospectively the severest povwark, to spend their Sabbaths in exposi-erty, the hardest toil to encounter, the tions of the Bible and in prayer. The names of the martyrs, Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and John Penry, are connected with this society. At one time, a majority of the members of the Church being in bonds, meetings were held in prison, through the connivance of the jailor. Other associations of similar character, were at the same time in other parts of the kingdom, reading and exhorting by stealth. At the dying request of the martyr, Penry, a conference was held among the brethren to take measures for some plan whereby they should depart in a body to some distant country; but with no immediate success. Subsequent sufferings, however, resulted in the May-Flower, which landed at what is now the pleasant little town of Plymouth, on a bay of the same name, about forty miles from Boston, cruelty of a savage foe, and the famine and sickness incident to a strange and uncultivated land. These things awaited them so surely as the perils of the ocean were overpast. Our steam-vessels, with all their splendid appointments and ingenious contrivances to master time and subdue danger, give us very inaccurate notions of the old ships known to the colonists. "At James's accession, there were not above four hundred vessels in England of four hundred tons burden. In their build, though very picturesque, they were tub-like and clumsy-the shape of the hull being very broad-bottomed and capacious, while the lofty cabins, built up fore and aft on deck, must have caused them to roll heavily in bad weather. This style has now become obsolete in Europe, but may still be seen in the Arab vessels THE MAY-FLOWER. in the Red Sea and the Levant." The cut which we give is supposed very nearly to resemble the May-Flower. As long as our language exists, the name of this little vessel will live too, and so will the names of some of those who adventured in it life, and all that was dearer than life, and sought in the great strange wilderness freedom to worship God, and ground wherein their bones might be buried. The annexed description of his own feelings on leaving home, and of the wonder of his neighbors, is quoted from Bradford himself, the early governor of Plymouth colony "Being thus constrained to leave their na tive country, their lands and livings, and all their friends and familiar acquaintance-it was much-and thought marvelous by many. But to go into a country they knew not but by hearsay, where they must learn a new language, and get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place and subject to the miseries of war, it was by many thought an undertaking almost desperate a case intolerable, and a misery worse than death-especially seeing they were not acquainted with trades nor traffic, (by which the country doth subsist,) but had only been used to a plain country life, and the innocent trade of husbandry." And he concludes by saying: "These things did not dismay them, for their desires were set on the ways of God, and to enjoy his ordinances; they rested in his providence, and knew whom they had believed." And what a beautiful example this resting of theirs in divine protection has bequeathed to us! Softly the winds were tempered to their shorn lambs, and the stony hills of New-England, under their culture, speedily blossomed as the rose. Theirs was no half-way trust, and theirs were no shivering souls that sought to wrap themselves in the pious mantles of Papal pretensions-warmed by the fire of zeal, they encased themselves in what seemed to them the armor of righteousness, and did battle mightily against the arch-enemy in whatever shape he appeared to them to assume. If they met his pride in the starch of a ruff, it was straightway broken-if they recognized his lures in the pranking of a Maypole, they stripped off the garlands, mindless of the sharp pricking of their own fingers; for they were no less brave in endurance than severe in infliction. They would have dashed themselves on the stones which they cast at dissenters, if they could have thought themselves other than instruments in the hands of God. Having put their hands to the plow there was no looking back-only a steady and firm going forward; and whatever objects opposed, must be torn up root and in the fire. No matter what cares opbranch, or wrenched away, or burned up pressed them, or what enemies beset them, the main object of their lives, the propagation of the gospel, was never lost sight of. "Only let us not be wanting on our parts, now that we are called to this work of the "Company for the Plantation of of the Lord's," writes Cradock, Governor Massachusetts Bay," to his worshipful friend, Endicott. I cannot but wish this good governor's estimate of tobacco were a little more popular in our day. If it could have been foreseen that in after times even the meeting-houses would be defiled by reason of it, doubtless the growing of it would have been prohibited altogether, even with the "necessity consideration" involved. In the letter already quoted from, Governor Cradock says:— "The course you have taken in giving our countrymen their content in the point of raising tobacco there for the present (their necessity considered) is not disallowed; but we trust in God other means will be found to employ their time more comfortable and profitable also in the end; and we cannot but generally ap prove and commend their good resolution to desist from the planting thereof, whenas they shall discover how to employ their labors otherduced unto by such precepts and examples as wise; which we hope they will be speedily inwe shall give them." But though averse to the raising of tobacco, and provident in the wisdom of the serpent as regarded trust in the fidelity of the "salvages," mere worldly interests were a secondary thing; and while wary in their trust of the "salvages," they were careful to make plentiful provision of good ministers; by whose faithful preaching, godly conversation, and exemplary life, they trusted to reduce them to obedience. To reduce, and not to persuade, was the method of procedure at the planting of the colonies, and we find the council styled the "Council of the Mattachusetts Bay," authorized to exclude from certain privileges which had been obtained, from the "especial grace of His Majesty, with great cost, favor of personages of note, and much labor”—" all persons, but such as were peacemakers, and of honest life and conversation, and desirous to conform themselves to good order and government." The annexed quotation from the aforementioned company's letter of general instruction to Endicott and his council, shows how strictly the growth of religious difference was guarded against. Thus: “Mr. Ralph Smith, a minister, hath desired passage in our ships; which was granted him before we understood of his difference in some things from our ministers. But his provisions for the voyage being shipped before notice was taken thereof, through many occasions wherewith those intrusted with this business have been employed; and forasmuch as from hence it is feared there may grow some distraction among you if there should be any siding, and that the worst may grow from different judgments; we have, therefore, thought fit to give you this order, that unless he will be conformable to our government, you suffer him not to remain within the limits of our grant." Mather informs us that John Cotton began the Sabbath the evening before, for which keeping of the Sabbath from evening to evening, he wrote arguments before his coming to New-England—so the practice appears to have been introduced from abroad. It doubtless originated in the injunction in Leviticus-" From even unto even shall you celebrate your Sabbaths.” The Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) began at six o'clock of our Friday, and the preparation for it at three in the afternoon. There appear to have been different opinions as to the length of time to be kept sacred, and in reference to it Hooker says:— "The question touching the beginning of the Sabbath is now on foot among us, hath once been spoken to, and we are to give in our arguments, each to the other, so that we may ripen our thoughts concerning that truth, and if the Lord will, it may more fully appear." We find no record of summer vacations among the ministers of those times. No time was out of season, and sometimes no choice as to the field of their labor seems to have been given them; and that there might be no difference about the appointing one to be minister to those sent to inhabit at Massachussetts Bay, we will have you (say the instructions) "make choice of one of three by lot; and on whom the lot shall fall, he shall go with his family to perform the work." The professions appear to have been less accessible in the olden time than now-a-days, inasmuch as the wholesome requisite of some sort of capability was desired on the part of the applicant. The following, throwing some light on this matter, is extracted from the "Letter of General Instruction to Endicott and his It further appears from the colony records of the court proceedings of the time, Council," previously quoted from:that "Ralph Smith was required to give, under his hand, that he would not exercise his ministry within the limits of the patent without express leave of the governor upon the spot." With regard to Sabbath keeping, we quote from the same letter of instruction: "And to the end the Sabbath may be celebrated in a religious manner, we appoint that all that inhabit the plantation, both for the general and for particular employments, may surcease their labor every Saturday throughout the year at three of the clock in the afternoon; and that they spend the rest of that day in catechising and preparation for the Sabbath, as the ministers shall direct." "We have entertained Lambert Wilson, chirurgeon, to remain with you in the service of the plantation; with whom we are agreed that planters that live in the plantation, three years, he shall serve this company, and the other and in that time apply himself to cure not only of such as came from hence for general and particular accounts, but also for the Indians, as from time to time he shall be directed by yourself or your successor, and the rest of the council. And, moreover, he is to educate and instruct one or more youths in his art, such as you and said council shall appoint, that may be helpful to him, and if occasion serve, suc ceed him in the plantation; which youth or youths, fit to learn that profession, let be placed with him; of which Mr. Hugeson's son, if his father approve thereof, may be one, the rather |