“Ah, well a day—­I suppose so, but then I look at my good Master Brewster and remember how, when I was a girl, he was at our good Queen Elizabeth’s court, ruffling it with the best, and everybody said that there wasn’t a young man that had good fortune to equal his.  Why, Master Davidson, the Queen’s Secretary of State, thought all the world of him; and when he went to Holland on the Queen’s business, he must take him along; and when he took the keys of the cities there, it was my master that he trusted them to, who used to sleep with them under his pillow.  I remember when he came home to the Queen’s court, wearing the great gold chain that the States had given him.  Ah me!  I little thought he would ever come to a poor man’s coat, then!”

“Well, good Margery,” said Rose, “it isn’t the coat, but the heart under it—­that’s the thing.  Thou hast more cause of pride in thy master’s poverty than in his riches.”

“Maybe so—­I don’t know,” said Margery, “but he hath had many a sore trouble in worldly things—­driven and hunted from place to place in England, clapt into prison, and all he had eaten up with fines and charges and costs.”

“All that is because he chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,” said Rose; “he shall have his reward by and by.”

“Well, there be good men and godly in Old England that get to heaven in better coats and with easy carriages and fine houses and servants, and I would my master had been of such.  But if he must come to the wilderness I will come with him.  Gracious me! what noise is that?” she exclaimed, as a sudden report of firearms from below struck her ear.  “I do believe there is that Frank Billington at the gunpowder; that boy will never leave, I do believe, till he hath blown up the ship’s company.”

In fact, it appeared that young master Frank, impatient of the absence of his father, had toled Wrestling Brewster and two other of the boys down into the cabin to show them his skill in managing his father’s fowling-piece, had burst the gun, scattering the pieces about the cabin.

Margery soon appeared, dragging the culprit after her.  “Look here now, Master Malapert, see what you’ll get when your father comes home!  Lord a mercy! here was half a keg of powder standing open!  Enough to have blown us all up!  Here, Master Clarke, Master Clarke, come and keep this boy with you till his father come back, or we be all sent sky high before we know.”

* * * *

At even tide the boat came back laden to the water’s edge with the first gettings and givings from the new soil of America.  There is a richness and sweetness gleaming through the brief records of these men in their journals, which shows how the new land was seen through a fond and tender medium, half poetic; and its new products lend a savor to them of somewhat foreign and rare.

Of this day’s expedition the record is thus: