“Hardly, do you call it?” echoed Standish. “Well, I know not. Had I been the judge the sentence should have been shorter and less spiteful. To my mind it is too much like the savages themselves to crop a man’s ears, and set him in the stocks, and pelt him with garbage, and burn his house in his own sight, and mulct him of his money, and ship him out of the country, and after all leave him at liberty to pull the wool over the eyes of the big-wigs and come back again to plague us as he did before. ’Tis womanish to invent so many ways of tormenting an offender, and yet not put further offense out of his power.”
“And if you had been judge?” asked Bradford with a shrewd smile.
For answer the captain raised an imaginary piece to his shoulder and gave the word of command,—
“One! Two! Three! FIRE!”
And with the last word he brought down his right foot with full force upon his own pipe, which had fallen unheeded from his pocket. The governor laughed, and Standish ruefully picked up the amber mouthpiece, exclaiming,—
“Now, by my faith! there goes the meerschaum that Jans Wiederhausen carved on purpose for a parting gift to me when we left Leyden ten year ago. And serves me right for wasting time on such boys’ tricks as yon brag of what I might have done had all been other than it was. Well, well! Sorry and sad I am to lose that pipe! Now I must turn to the one Hobomok has carved out of what I take to be a jasper stone, but ’t is heavy, and cannot drink up the poison of the tobacco as my meerschaum did. There’s naught for a pipe like meerschaum, Will.”
“Clay is well enough for me,” replied the governor with a smile, as he brought a new clay pipe from the cupboard and presented it to Myles.
Nor shall we be surprised to hear that when, a year later, Captain William Pierce came over in the Lyon to Boston Bay, he brought a fine meerschaum pipe as a present from Governor Bradford to his friend Captain Standish.