CHAPTER IV.
THOU ART THE MAN!
Again Bartholomew Allerton, with much pride in the performance, beat out the “assembly” in the Town Square, and at the sound some fourscore men gathered from the houses, the shore, or those impaled garden plots surrounding each house, where already patient toil had produced in the wilderness very sweet reminiscences of English cottage-gardens.
The weather was wild, and ominous with the promise of one of those fierce storms of wind and rain, pretty sure to visit the coast in March and September, and still called by Plymouth folk the line storm, or the equinoctial, in calm contempt of modern meteorological theories. They also call a thunder-shower, however slight, a “tempest,” and who is to object? Not I.
“Master Lyford’s friends are gathering in force,” remarked Standish, as he stood at the door of his house just below the Fort on Burying Hill.
“His friends!” repeated Alden, who, living in the house between that of the governor and the captain, was often to be found in company of the latter. “I did not think he had friends enough in Plymouth to be called a force.”
“Not in Plymouth, nor yet in heaven, but somewhere between the two. The armies of the Prince of the Power of the Air.”