y and night
over her far-away husband. She toiled diligently, so that her children
did not suffer for lack of bread, but the worry broke her heart, and
when she had saved a little sum of money, enough to pay for her voyage,
she left England and joined the colonists who in ever larger numbers
sought the land of freedom across the sea.

She did not live to set her foot on that strange, unknown land, but the
good Lord called her out of all trouble, and she was buried in the sea.

Fred was old enough to realize what the death of his beloved mother
meant, and Agnes, too, wept bitterly when they took away her mother and
softly and slowly laid her away in the rolling waves.

The little band of emigrants at first worried considerably about what
to do with the children. The majority of them were poor and blessed
with large families so that they did not have any food to spare. Hence
their joy was great when Clara Bradley volunteered to adopt the children
as her own.

She herself was on the way to meet her husband, who two years before, in
1628, had left England with the Puritans to settle in the new territory
granted by the King to the Massachusetts Company. The Puritans, as you
know, differed from the Pilgrims in many respects; in consequence, they
wished to establish their own settlements far enough away from the
Plymouth Colony to avoid misunderstanding and trouble.

As soon as Mr. Bradley had arrived in the new settlement he wrote a long
letter to his wife in which he described the wonderful country in which
he had found a new home. But he begged her to wait for some time until
he had built a house, cleared a small piece of land, and made other
preparations to welcome his young and beautiful wife.

In England Mr. Bradley had been a merchant, and his wife came from a
rich family so that he did not care to burden her with the hardships of
primitive pioneer life. But she was a sensible woman, who was not
afraid to work, and since she loved her husband dearly, she insisted
that she would come and share with him the woe and weal of his life.

When, therefore, in 1630, the Massachusetts Company gave the people in
the Colony the right to govern themselves, and in consequence,
thousands of Puritans were willing to go to America, she would stay in
England no longer, but sold her property, collected her belongings, and
sailed with the first band of emigrants, in whose midst was also John
Winthrop, the new governor.

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