“‘Forgive me,’ he said,
‘I have been angry and hurt—too long have I cherished the feeling;
I have been cruel and hard, but now, thank God, it is ended.
Mine is the same hot blood that leaped in the veins of Hugh Standish:
Sensitive, swift to resent, but as swift in atoning for error.
Never so much as now was Miles Standish the friend of John Alden.’”
In a similar strain he addressed the bride. The Pilgrims were amazed and overjoyed to see their heroic Captain returned to them. Tumultuously they gathered around him. Bride and bridegroom were forgotten in the greeting which was extended to the Captain.
Some cattle had, by this time, been brought to the colony, and a snow-white bull had fallen to the lot of John Alden. The animal was covered with a crimson cloth upon which was bound a cushion. Priscilla mounted this strange palfrey, which her husband led by a cord tied to an iron ring in its nostrils. Her friends followed, and thus she was led to her home.
“Onward the bridal procession now moved to their new habitation,
Happy husband and wife and friends conversing together.
Pleasantly murmured the brook, as they crossed the ford in the forest,
Pleased with the image, that passed like a dream of love through its bosom,
Tremulous, floating in air, o’er the depth of the azure abysses;
Down through the golden leaves the sun was pouring his splendors,
Gleaming on purple grapes that, from branches above them suspended,
Mingled their odorous breath with the balm of the pine and the fir-tree,
Wild and sweet as the clusters that grew in the valley of Eschol;
Like a picture it seemed of the primitive pastoral ages,
Fresh with the youth of the world, and recalling Rebecca and Isaac,
Old, and yet ever new, and simple and beautiful always,
Love immortal and young in the endless succession of lovers,
So, through the Plymouth woods, passed onward the bridal procession.”
Such is the poetic version of the legend of the Courtship of Miles Standish. Nearly every event which the poet has woven into his harmonious lines, is accurate even in its most minute details. We have given but a meagre view of the beauties of this Idyl, and commend the same, in full, to the perusal of the reader.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Trading-Posts Menaced.
Menace of the Narragansets.—Roger Williams.—Difficulty on the Kennebec.—Bradford’s Narrative.—Captain Standish as Mediator.—The French on the Penobscot.—Endeavors to Regain the Lost Port.—Settlements on the Connecticut River.—Mortality among the Indians.—Hostility of the Pequots.—Efforts to Avert War.—The Pequot Forts.—Death of Elder Brewster.—His Character.
In the spring of the year 1632 an Indian runner came, in breathless haste, into the village of Plymouth, with the intelligence that the Narragansets, under Canonicus, were marching against Mount Hope, and that Massassoit implored the aid of the Pilgrims. The chief of the Wampanoags had fled, with a party of his warriors, to Sowams, in the present town of Warren, R. I., where the Pilgrims had a trading-post. It used to be said, in the French army, during the wars of Napoleon I., that the presence of the Emperor, on the field of an approaching battle, was equivalent to a re-enforcement of one hundred thousand men. It seems to have been the impression, with both colonists and Indians, that Captain Standish, in himself alone, was a resistless force. He was immediately despatched to Sowams, with three men, to repel an army of nobody knew how many hundreds of savage warriors.
Upon his arrival at Sowams, the captain soon learned that the Wampanoags were indeed in serious peril. The Narragansets were advancing in much strength. Captain Standish sent promptly a messenger to Plymouth to forward a re-enforcement to him immediately, with powder and muskets. As there was but little ammunition at that time in Plymouth, application was made to Governor Winthrop, of Massachusetts, for a supply. There were but few horses then in either of the colonies, and the messenger returned on foot through the woods with twenty-seven pounds of powder upon his back, which Governor Winthrop had contributed from his own stores. Fortunately the Pequots, taking advantage of the absence of the Narraganset warriors, made an inroad upon their territory, which caused Canonicus to abandon his march upon Sowams and to make a precipitate retreat to defend his own realms.