now, sitting beside Miles on the turned-up mattress, where at night Goodman Rigdale and his son slept, and Miles, with a question here and there to draw out what he sought, listened again to the story of the Pilgrims.

[32]

Love had good reason to know it well, for his father, Elder Brewster, had been from the first one of the leaders of the little company. He had given all his substance to help the cause of that faith which the bishops of the great Established Church of England held it right to crush out; he had suffered imprisonment for the sake of that faith; and finally, that he and his friends might worship God as they thought best, had gone into exile in Holland.

There for twelve years the Pilgrim church held its own, though its members, for all their efforts to support themselves in that strange country, fared hardly and poorly. Good Deacon Fuller, the physician, had been glad to earn his living as a say or serge maker; Master William Bradford had been a maker of fustian; and the Elder had maintained his family and aided his poorer companions by teaching English to Danish and German gentlemen, and later by printing English books.

Love told also of Master Carver, the recently elected governor of the company, who had given[33] his whole fortune to the Pilgrim cause; and he spoke of gallant Master Edward Winslow, who, travelling in the Low Countries with his newly married wife, had come to know and to respect the Pilgrim folk and finally to cast in his lot with theirs. And, best of all, Love could tell of Captain Standish.

[33]

There the boy turned to what Miles had been waiting to hear, and be sure that now he eagerly drank in each word: how the Captain came of a great family in Lancashire, where he had a vast estate which his kinsfolk had taken from him,—so Love had once heard him say to the Elder; how he had fought bravely against the wicked Spaniards, as far back as the time of Queen Bess, when Miles Standish was a very young man indeed; and how, of a sudden, he had come with his young wife and joined himself to the Pilgrims, why, none could say, for he was "not of our faith," Love gravely quoted the older people.

That last did not greatly displease Miles, perhaps because his own father was rather a Puritan than an ardent Separatist, as those were called who, like the Pilgrims of Leyden, broke off all communion with the Established Church. Goodman John Rigdale grumbled about the bishops and the vestments of the 

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