go to New England till the following year (in the Fortune), and of course had no relation to the Speedwell.  Neither does Edward Winslow—­the only authority for the parentage of “Delanoy”—­state that “he was born in Leyden,” as Baird alleges, but only that “he was born of French parents . . . and came to us from Leyden to New Plymouth,”—­an essential variance in several important particulars.  Scores and perhaps hundreds of people have been led to believe Priscilla Mullens a French Protestant of the Leyden congregation, and themselves—­as her descendants—­“of Huguenot stock,” because of these absolutely groundless assertions of Dr. Baird.  They lent themselves readily to Mrs. Austin’s fertile imagination and facile pen, and as “welcome lies” acquired a hold on the public mind, from which even the demonstrated truth will never wholly dislodge them.  The comment of the intelligent writer in the “Historic-Genealogical Register” referred to is proof of this.  So fast-rooted had these assertions become in her thought as the truth, that, confronted with the evidence that Master Mullens and his family were from Dorking in England, it does not occur to her to doubt the correctness of the impression which the recklessness of Baird had created,—­that they were of Leyden,—­and she hence amusingly suggests that “they must have moved from Leyden to Dorking.”  These careless utterances of one who is especially bound by his position, both as a writer and as a teacher of morals, to be jealous for the truth, might be partly condoned as attributable to mistake or haste, except for the facts that they seem to have been the fountain-head of an ever-widening stream of serious error, and that they are preceded on the very page that bears them by others as to the Pilgrim exodus equally unhappy.  It seems proper to suggest that it is high time that all lovers of reliable history should stand firmly together against the flood of loose statement which is deluging the public; brand the false wherever found; and call for proof from of all new and important historical propositions put forth.

Stephen Hopkins may possibly have had more than one wife before
     Elizabeth, who accompanied him to New England and was mother of the
     sea-born son Oceanus.  Hopkins’s will indicates his affection for
     this latest wife, in unusual degree for wills of that day.  With
     singular carelessness, both of the writer and his proof-reader, Hon.
     William T. Davis states that Damaris Hopkins was born “after the
     arrival” in New England.  The contrary is, of course, a well
     established fact.  Mr. Davis was probably led into this error by
     following Bradford’s “summary” as affecting the Hopkins family.  He
     states therein that Hopkins “had one son, who became a seaman and
     died at Barbadoes probably Caleb, and four daugh ters born here.” 
     To make up these “four” daughters “born here” Davis found it