Soldier Rigdale: How He Sailed in the Mayflower and How He Served Miles Standish

by Beulah Marie Dix

Master Hopkins tried also, conscientiously, to keep him to the path of strict virtue, with admonitions, and, if need were, with corrections. It was an age of whippings, and, on occasion, Miles was whipped painstakingly. Master Hopkins's floggings were, on the whole, not so severe as Goodman Rigdale used to give his son, but Miles resented them with an amazing outburst of anger. "You are not my father; you have no right to beat me," he cried, the first time Master Hopkins took a birch rod to him, and, swinging round in a fury, he lustily kicked his chastiser's shins.

After that one attempt and the sorry consequences which it entailed, he never again tried to defend himself, but, though he had to submit, the old feeling remained; to the pain and shame of a beating was now added a rankling sense of the injustice and, so to speak, of the illegality of it all.

Beatings, though, were something every boy in the colony, even the sober Giles, had a good share of, so Miles made shift to endure; but Master Hopkins presently devised a new-fangled means of persecution, for he insisted on teaching him to read.

The boy had clung to the black-letter Bible because it was his father's, and sometimes of a Sunday, between the morning and afternoon teachings at the Common House, when it grew irksome to sit quiet and do nothing, would take the book and spell out half a chapter, and amuse himself with looking at the funny black letters. But one Sunday, a warm May Sunday, when Miles was lying with his book in the young grass in the shadow of the house, Master Hopkins, noting his unusual employment, bade him read aloud to him, and, as he was a man of education, was honestly shocked that, as he put it, "the lad could scarce spell out his mother-tongue."

From that time dated Miles's tribulations. It was useless to protest that he could read well enough, he did not wish to read better; Master Hopkins's decree went forth that every night after supper the boy was to come to him with his Bible, and read aloud a chapter. Miles never reflected that, after a day of hard labor in the fields or woods, or of serious consultation with the other leaders of the colony, it could be neither restful nor pleasant to Master Hopkins to hear a stupid little boy stumble through a dreary waste of words. But he was quite aware of the unjust fact that the space of daylight, in the long summer evenings after supper, was the time when all the other lads were at liberty to play, while he must drone out the chronicles of dead and gone Hebrews with unpronounceable names.

The reading lesson always took place just without the house-door, where there was a bench on which Master Hopkins sat; Miles stood beside him, where he could see the harbor and the street, with the boys passing down it to the beach, perhaps; and where, too, it was convenient for Master Hopkins to cuff his ears when his attention strayed hopelessly from the book to the affairs of his playmates.

Sometimes, when he wished to get away and join them in carrying out a long-laid plan of sport, Miles would pore over his chapter twice or thrice in the day, and so, when evening came, be able to read it fairly. But on such occasions Master Hopkins always said there would be time to finish another chapter; and when it came to that, poor, disappointed Miles always stumbled, so that his lesson ended in disgrace and bitter rebuke.

Early in July, however, he had a blissful holiday, for Master Hopkins went with Master Winslow and Squanto far inland to visit King Massasoit, so for five days there was no one to bid Miles read a word. Neither did any one whip him, for all he shirked his weeding, and ran away to fish in the harbor with Ned Lister and the sailor, Trevor, and played by the brookside with the other boys till long after dark.