bodily sustenance and comfort of the brethren
(many of them coming in from the surrounding
villages), by whom his dwelling was
frequented.

The pastor of this little flock of Separatists
was John Robinson, of whom it seems to
have been said with truth, that he was the
most learned, polished, and modest spirit
that ever that sect enjoyed.

Scrooby alone was a place too small to
yield many to the fold; but country people,
as we have said, journeyed thither from all
places within walking distance; and among
those who so came was a young man,
between fifteen and eighteen years of age, the
same person whose account of the growth of
religious feeling we were lately quoting. This
was William Bradford, a youth maintained
under the care of his uncles at Austerfield, a
village on the Yorkshire side of Bawtry,
distant from Scrooby perhaps some three
miles. Austerfield is a village that
consisted and consists of a few farm-labourers'
cottages and a small antique chapel.

William Bradford is one of the most
important persons in the little story lately
brought to light by the antiquarian skill of
the Rev. J. Hunter, which tells of the Pilgrim
Fathers in the days before they set out on
their pilgrimage. His grandfather and
another man were, in fifteen hundred and
seventy-five, the only persons in the township
assessed to the subsidy. William himself
lost his father when he was only a year and
a half old. and his mother married again
about two years afterwards. Charge of the
boy was taken by his grandmother and
uncles, and a note or two from the will of one
of these uncles will give some idea of the social
position of the family to which belonged the
leader of the pilgrims. This uncle Robert
bequeathed to his son Robert his best
ironbound wain, the cupboard in the house-
place, one long table with a frame, and one
long form, with his best yoke of oxen; also
"the counter whereon the evidences are."
The same Bradford had received, during
his life-time, the bequest of a deceased
friend's grey suit of apparel, while his son
obtained as a legacy one fustian doublet and
one pair of hose. Many bequests were liberal
in those days which may now excite a smile.
A learned divine, by whose books young
William Bradford may have profited when
books were dear and scarce, gave at his death
to the poor scholars of the Grammar-school at
Rossington, his Cooper's Dictionary, to be
chained to a stall in the church, and used
by them as long as it would last.

The young and earnest mind of William
Bradford was aroused first by the repute of
the ministry of Richard Clifton, a grave
Puritan divine, who held the rectory of
Babworth, near Scrooby, and in the Church at
Babworth preached what he held to be pure
doctrine so forcibly that he was at last
silenced by authority.

While Clifton preached in Babworth
Church, Bradford walked punctually thither
to receive instruction from him. When
Clifton was silenced the young man burned
with a spirit of resentment against church
oppression; and, in spite of all temporal
risk, declared himself a Separatist and
attached himself to the congregation meeting
in the manor-house at Scrooby. His natural
ability and force of character there soon
approved themselves,—he became the prompter
and the guide of the little church as to all
temporal matters, and when it severed itself
from its native country, and the laws of
England, he became in the natural course of
things—its civil head. He was at New
Plymouth Governor Bradford.

The separation, not from the church only
but from the state, arose out of the burst of
persecution with which the state was supporting
all church claims. As after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, French Huguenots
came in bands to England and established
colonies in sundry places, Spitalfields for one;
so the proceedings of English Ecclesiastical
Commissioners, in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, drove little bands of
English Huguenots to that country in
Europe which alone allowed them liberty
of conscience; that is to say, to Holland.

But the Scrooby church was not the first
to emigrate. John Smith, the pastor of an
adjacent flock, at Gainsborough, had gone
before to Amsterdam, whither he had been
preceded by his tutor, Mr. Johnson. Mr.
Smith was a man difficult of temper, and
between Smith and Johnson bickerings arose
by which the Separatist church was damaged.
The Huguenots of Scrooby, under Robinson
and Clifton (then a venerable man with a
white beard), the elder Brewster and young
Bradford prepared to follow in considerable
numbers, some leaving by Boston, others by
the Humber.

In each case the Dutch captains who were
to have conveyed them played them false.
One delivered them into the hands of the
civil power; the other sailed away when half
his passengers had been embarked, and left
a crowd of helpless women and children half
distracted on the shore. Many of the brethren
were by checks like these disheartened,
but at the end of the year one thousand six
hundred and eight, all the stronger spirits
had contrived to find their way to Amsterdam.
There the church under Robinson was
pestered by the Smith and Johnson discords.
After a year's trial, the earnest men of Scrooby
saw no farther hope of peace, and went accordingly
out of the way of quarrelling from
Amsterdam to Leyden. They remained eleven
years at Leyden under Robinson their pastor.

At the end of that time the promoters
of the Virginia company, who were beating
up and down for colonists, tempted them
with the hope of a free soil, on which they
might live socially as Englishmen, and no