I   OFTEN fancy John Alden, and others, too, among his companions of kindly fame, wandering down the long Plymouth beach and murmuring to themselves thoughts like these. And I like to look in the annals of the gentle Pilgrims and the sterner Puritans for any pages where one may find muffled for a moment the strain of high emprise which wins our awe and our praise, but not so surely our love, and gain access on their more human side to the men and women who lived the noblest romance in all histor

ONE of the few perfect jewels of romance, needing neither the craft of imagination nor cunning device of word-cutting lapidary, is that of Agnes Surriage, so improbable, according to every-day standards, so informed with the truest sentiment, and so calculated to satisfy every exaction of literary art, that even the most critical eye might be forgiven for tracing its shifting color to the light of fancy, and not of homely truth. Even at the present day, when the “Neck” is overrun by the too-civi

NEW ENGLAND had her spurts of human nature in old times, whenever she was not taken up with the witches and the Tories, and could afford a nine-days’ wonder over so simple a thing as a marriage between high and low. For we had not got then to a professional denial of difference between high and low; not as yet had the bell of Philadelphia cracked its heart, like the philosopher Chilo, with public joy, and proclaimed the crooked ways straight, and the rough places plain. When some sweet scrub of