oubtless addressed her with words of comfort. "Cheer up, my good lady!"
he would say.

"In a little time you will love this rude life of the wilderness as I
do." But Endicott's heart was as bold and resolute as iron, and he could
not understand why a woman's heart should not be of iron too.

Still, however, he spoke kindly to the lady, and then hastened forth
to till his cornfield and set out fruit-trees, or to bargain with the
Indians for furs, or perchance to oversee the building of a fort. Also,
being a magistrate, he had often to punish some idler or evil doer, by
ordering him to be set in the stocks or scourged at the whipping-post.
Often, too, as was the custom of the times, he and Mr. Higginson,
the minister of Salem, held long religious talks together. Thus John
Endicott was a man of multifarious business, and had no time to look
back regretfully to his native land. He felt himself fit for the New
World and for the work that he had to do, and set himself resolutely to
accomplish it.

What a contrast, my dear children, between this bold, rough, active man,
and the gentle Lady Arbella, who was fading away, like a pale English
flower, in the shadow of the forest! And now the great chair was often
empty, because Lady Arbella grew too weak to arise from bed.

Meantime, her husband had pitched upon a spot for their new home. He
returned from Boston to Salem, travelling through the woods on foot, and
leaning on his pilgrim's staff. His heart yearned within him; for he was
eager to tell his wife of the new home which he had chosen. But when he
beheld her pale and hollow cheek, and found how her strength was wasted,
he must have known that her appointed home was in a better land. Happy
for him then--happy both for him and her--if they remembered that there
was a path to heaven, as well from this heathen wilderness as from the
Christian land whence they had come. And so, in one short month from her
arrival, the gentle Lady Arbella faded away and died. They dug a grave
for her in the new soil, where the roots of the pine-trees impeded their
spades; and when her bones had rested there nearly two hundred years,
and a city had sprung up around them, a church of stone was built upon
the spot.

Charley, almost at the commencement of the foregoing narrative, had
galloped away, with a prodigious clatter, upon Grandfather's stick, and
was not yet returned. So large a boy should have been ashamed to ride
upon a stick. But Laur