“What pale and bright-eyed little boy is this, Tobias?” she inquired.  “Is he one whom the wilderness folk have ravished from some Christian mother?”

“No, Dorothy, this poor child is no captive from the wilderness,” he replied.  “The heathen savage would have given him to eat of his scanty morsel, and to drink of his birchen cup; but Christian men, alas! had cast him out to die.”

Then he told her how he had found him beneath the gallows, upon his father’s grave; and how his heart had prompted him, like the speaking of an inward voice, to take the little outcast home, and be kind unto him.  He acknowledged his resolution to feed and clothe him, as if he were his own child, and to afford him the instruction which should counteract the pernicious errors hitherto instilled into his infant mind.  Dorothy was gifted with even a quicker tenderness than her husband, and she approved of all his doings and intentions.

“Have you a mother, dear child?” she inquired.

The tears burst forth from his full heart, as he attempted to reply; but Dorothy at length understood that he had a mother, who, like the rest of her sect, was a persecuted wanderer.  She had been taken from the prison a short time before, carried into the uninhabited wilderness, and left to perish there by hunger or wild beasts.  This was no uncommon method of disposing of the Quakers, and they were accustomed to boast, that the inhabitants of the desert were more hospitable to them than civilized man.

“Fear not, little boy, you shall not need a mother, and a kind one,” said Dorothy, when she had gathered this information.  “Dry your tears, Ilbrahim, and be my child, as I will be your mother.”

The good woman prepared the little bed, from which her own children had successively been borne to another resting-place.  Before Ilbrahim would consent to occupy it, he knelt down, and as Dorothy listened to his simple and affecting prayer, she marvelled how the parents that had taught it to him could have been judged worthy of death.  When the boy had fallen asleep, she bent over his pale and spiritual countenance, pressed a kiss upon his white brow, drew the bedclothes up about his neck, and went away with a pensive gladness in her heart.

Tobias Pearson was not among the earliest emigrants from the old country.  He had remained in England during the first years of the civil war, in which he had borne some share as a cornet of dragoons, under Cromwell.  But when the ambitious designs of his leader began to develop themselves, he quitted the army of the Parliament, and sought a refuge from the strife, which was no longer holy, among the people of his persuasion in the colony of Massachusetts.  A more worldly consideration had perhaps an influence in drawing him thither; for New England offered advantages to men of unprosperous fortunes, as well as to dissatisfied religionists, and Pearson had hitherto found it difficult