her ear; and though she was as a rule stern and unimaginative, she was
more profoundly affected by this mystery than she knew. It was to bear
terrible fruit in after time in the horrors of Salem witchcraft; but for
the present it only tried and proved and hardened the courage of the
women who faced it with confidence in the strength of their husbands and
in the protection of their God.

So to New England and Virginia there came the founders of a race led
forth from home by different motives, bringing different qualities of
body and mind and spirit to the formation of the people, but both
foundations possessing strength upon which could be built a mighty
nation. And not the men of Jamestown or Roanoke, with their fighting and
their tilling, not the Pilgrim Fathers, with their stern courage and
their strait creed, but the women of Virginia and the Pilgrim Mothers
were those to whom must look that new nation for all its best. It was
not the blood of kings and princes that came to vitalize this our land
in the period of its rescue from the dominion of the lesser races, but
the blood of yeomen and peasants, sprung from generations of fighters
with the soil rather than with men, yet soldiers too, and so in all ways
fitted for the battles they must wage with men and beasts and the earth
itself ere they could win an empire for their race. And this blood comes
down to us through the women of that day--the Mothers of a Nation.

CHAPTER V

THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD

There were many marked differences between the period of settlement and
the early colonial period, which latter, for our present purpose, we may
roughly class as that extending from 1630 to 1685. Of course the most
salient difference was that in the colonial epoch there first appeared
the racial American as we now know him--not the red man of the forest
and plain, to whom such title was really due, but the white American,
the son of the soil, but not of generations of dwellers thereupon,--the
American as universally entitled to-day.

It must be remembered that there is no parallelism in the chronology of
the beginnings of the North and the South. The Virginia colony was, in
matter of time, far in advance of that on the shores of Massachusetts
Bay, and the colonial period had fairly begun in the South when
settlement was yet hardly established in the North. Many white children,
native Americans, had succeeded Virginia Dare in the southern colony
before Pere