rothy listened to his
simple and affecting prayer, she marvelled how the parents that had
taught it to him could have been judged worthy of death. When the boy
had fallen asleep, she bent over his pale and spiritual countenance,
pressed a kiss upon his white brow, drew the bedclothes up about his
neck, and went away with a pensive gladness in her heart.

Tobias Pearson was not among the earliest emigrants from the old
country. He had remained in England during the first years of the civil
war, in which he had borne some share as a cornet of dragoons, under
Cromwell. But when the ambitious designs of his leader began to develop
themselves, he quitted the army of the Parliament, and sought a refuge
from the strife, which was no longer holy, among the people of his
persuasion in the colony of Massachusetts. A more worldly consideration
had perhaps an influence in drawing him thither; for New England offered
advantages to men of unprosperous fortunes, as well as to dissatisfied
religionists, and Pearson had hitherto found it difficult to provide for
a wife and increasing family. To this supposed impurity of motive, the
more bigoted Puritans were inclined to impute the removal by death of
all the children, for whose earthly good the father had been
over-thoughtful. They had left their native country blooming like roses,
and like roses they had perished in a foreign soil. Those expounders of
the ways of Providence, who had thus judged their brother, and
attributed his domestic sorrows to his sin, were not more charitable
when they saw him and Dorothy endeavoring to fill up the void in their
hearts by the adoption of an infant of the accursed sect. Nor did they
fail to communicate their disapprobation to Tobias; but the latter, in
reply, merely pointed at the little, quiet, lovely boy, whose appearance
and deportment were indeed as powerful arguments as could possibly have
been adduced in his own favor. Even his beauty, however, and his winning
manners, sometimes produced an effect ultimately unfavorable; for the
bigots, when the outer surfaces of their iron hearts had been softened
and again grew hard, affirmed that no merely natural cause could have so
worked upon them.

Their antipathy to the poor infant was also increased by the ill success
of divers theological discussions, in which it was attempted to convince
him of the errors of his sect. Ilbrahim, it is true, was not a skilful
controversialist; but the feeling of his