The men with the bills and guns arrested them; but, though they hurried their prisoners from place to place, no Justice could be found to send women to gaol for no other crime than wanting to go with their husbands. We know not what befell them. The most likely suggestion is that "they took divers ways, and were received into various houses by kind-hearted country folk." Yet this we do know. They rallied somewhere at a later day, and John Robinson and William Brewster, and other principal members of the devoted sect, including Richard Clyfton, "were of the last, and stayed to help the weakest over before them;" and Bradford tells us with a sigh of satisfaction that "notwithstanding all these storms of opposition, they all gatt over at length, some at one time and some at another, and some in one place and some in another, and mette togeather againe according to their desires, with no small rejoycing"—to take part in the wonderful movement, begun by the Pilgrims and continued by the Puritans, that gave to a new land a new nation. Thus, wrote Richard Monckton Milnes, in some verses dated "The Hall, Bawtry, May 30th, 1854"—
Thus, to men cast in that heroic mould
Came Empire, such as Spaniard never knew—
Such Empire as beseems the just and true;
And at the last, almost unsought, came gold.
Copyright, 1904, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth
Elder William Brewster
III
LIFE IN LEYDEN—ADIEU TO PLYMOUTH—THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST
Photograph by W. P. Demmenie, Leyden
John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim Fathers Worshipped