She could scarcely believe after she had sailed so many weeks over the unchanging ocean, where there were not even the signs to go by that she could read in the trackless forest, that there was land again beyond all the water.  It was a marvel which no amount of explanations could simplify that men should be able to guide ships back and forth across this waste.  Perhaps this more than any of the wonders she was to see later was what made her esteem the white men’s genius most.

And then one day a grey cloud rested on the eastern horizon.  Pocahontas saw a new look in her husband’s face as he caught sight of it.

“England!” he cried, and then he lifted little Thomas to his shoulder and bade him, “Look at thy father’s England.”

Even before they stepped ashore at Plymouth Pocahontas’s impressions of the country began.  On board the ship came officers from the Virginia Company to greet her and put themselves and the exchequer of the Company at her disposal.  Was she not the daughter of their Indian ally, a monarch of whose kingdom and power they possessed but the most confused idea.  They had arranged, they said, suitable lodgings for Lady Rebecca, Master Rolfe and their infant in London and—­with much waving of plumed hats and bowing—­they would attend in every manner to her comfort and amusement.

These men were different from any Pocahontas had ever seen; the colonists were all, willy nilly, workers, or at least adventure lovers.  These comfortable citizens were of a type as new to her as she to them.

As they rode slowly on their way to London at every mile of the road she cried out with delighted interest and questioned Rolfe without ceasing about the timbered and stuccoed cottages, the beautiful hedges, the rich farms and paddocks filled with horses and cattle.  At midday and at night when they stopped at the inns, she was eager to examine everything, from the still-room to the fragrant attics where bunches of herbs hung from the rafters.  Yet even in her girlish eagerness she bore herself with a dignity that never allowed the simplest to doubt that, in spite of her dark skin, she was a lady of high birth.

“Ah!  John,” she said, “this is so fair a land; I know not how thou couldst leave it.  I can scarcely wait when I lie abed at night for the morn to come.  There is ever something new, and new things, thou knowest, have ever been delightful to my spirit.”

“And to mine also, Rebecca,” he answered; “for that reason did I seek Wingandacoa and rejoiced in its strangeness, even as thou dost rejoice in the strangeness of my country.”

The nearer they drew to London the more there was to see.  The highway was filled with those coming and going from town; merchants, farmers with their wares, butchers, travelling artisans, tinkers, peddlers, gypsies, great ladies on horseback or in coaches, who stared at Pocahontas, and gentlemen who questioned the servants about her.  And Pocahontas asked Rolfe about all of them, of their condition, their manner of living and what their homes were like within.