As the boy thus led her by the hand in his quiet progress over the borders of eternity, Dorothy almost imagined that she could discern the near though dim delightfulness of the home he was about to reach; she would not have enticed the little wanderer back, though she bemoaned herself that she must leave him and return.  But just when Ilbrahim’s feet were pressing on the soil of Paradise he heard a voice behind him, and it recalled him a few, few paces of the weary path which he had travelled.  As Dorothy looked upon his features she perceived that their placid expression was again disturbed.  Her own thoughts had been so wrapped in him that all sounds of the storm and of human speech were lost to her; but when Catharine’s shriek pierced through the room, the boy strove to raise himself.

“Friend, she is come!  Open unto her!” cried he.

In a moment his mother was kneeling by the bedside; she drew Ilbrahim to her bosom, and he nestled there with no violence of joy, but contentedly as if he were hushing himself to sleep.  He looked into her face, and, reading its agony, said with feeble earnestness,

“Mourn not, dearest mother.  I am happy now;” and with these words the gentle boy was dead.

* * * * *

The king’s mandate to stay the New England persecutors was effectual in preventing further martyrdoms, but the colonial authorities, trusting in the remoteness of their situation, and perhaps in the supposed instability of the royal government, shortly renewed their severities in all other respects.  Catharine’s fanaticism had become wilder by the sundering of all human ties; and wherever a scourge was lifted, there was she to receive the blow; and whenever a dungeon was unbarred, thither she came to cast herself upon the floor.  But in process of time a more Christian spirit—­a spirit of forbearance, though not of cordiality or approbation—­began to pervade the land in regard to the persecuted sect.  And then, when the rigid old Pilgrims eyed her rather in pity than in wrath, when the matrons fed her with the fragments of their children’s food and offered her a lodging on a hard and lowly bed, when no little crowd of schoolboys left their sports to cast stones after the roving enthusiast,—­then did Catharine return to Pearson’s dwelling, and made that her home.

As if Ilbrahim’s sweetness yet lingered round his ashes, as if his gentle spirit came down from heaven to teach his parent a true religion, her fierce and vindictive nature was softened by the same griefs which had once irritated it.  When the course of years had made the features of the unobtrusive mourner familiar in the settlement, she became a subject of not deep but general interest—­a being on whom the otherwise superfluous sympathies of all might be bestowed.  Every one spoke of her with that degree of pity which it is pleasant to experience; every one was ready to do her the little kindnesses which are not costly, yet manifest good-will; and when at last she died, a long train of her once bitter persecutors followed her with decent sadness and tears that were not painful to her place by Ilbrahim’s green and sunken grave.