The tempered beams of a September sun glanced mildly on the quiet shores of the Massachusetts, and tinged with mellowed hues the richness of its autumnal scenery.  It was on that holy day, which our puritan ancestors were wont to regard emphatically as a “day of rest;” and nature seemed hushed to a repose as deep and expressive as on that first earthly sabbath when God finished his creative work, and “saw that it was very good.”  The public worship of the morning was ended; and the citizens of Boston were dispersing through the different streets and avenues of the town, to their various places of abode.  The mass which issued from the portal of the sanctuary with grave and orderly demeanor, appeared to melt away as one by one, or in household groups, they turned aside to their respective dwellings, till all gradually disappeared, and the streets were again left silent and deserted.

Arthur Stanhope had withdrawn from the crowd, and stood alone on the margin of the bay, which curved its broad basin around the peninsula of Boston.  He had received no tidings from St. John’s, since the day he quitted it; and, with extreme impatience, he awaited the return of a small trading vessel, which was hourly expected from thence.  But his eyes vainly traversed the wide expanse of water; all around it blended with the bright blue sky, and no approaching bark darkened its unruffled surface.  Silence reigned over the scene as undisturbed as when the adventurous pilgrims first leaped upon the inhospitable shore.  But it was the silence of that hallowed rest which man offered in homage to his creator, not that primeval calm which then brooded over the savage wilderness.  Time, since the day on which they took possession, had caused the waste places to “rejoice, and the desert to blossom as a rose.”  The land to which they fled from the storms of persecution had become a pleasant abode; and their interests and affections were detached from the parent country, and fixed on the home of their adoption.

The tide of emigration ceased with the triumph of the puritan cause in England; but the early colonists had already laid deep the broad foundations on which the fabric of civil and religious liberty was reared.  Prudence and persevering zeal had conquered the first and most arduous labors of the settlement; and they looked forward with pious confidence to its future prosperity, firmly persuaded that God had reserved it for the resting place of his chosen people.  The rugged soil yielded to the hand of industry, and brought forth its treasures.  The shores of the bay no longer presented a scene of wild and solitary magnificence.  Forests, which had defied the blasts of ages, were swept away; and, in their stead, fields of waving grain hung their golden ears in the ripening sun, ready for the coming harvest.  Flocks and herds grazed in the green pastures which sloped to the water’s edge, or collected in meditative groups beneath the scattered trees that spread their