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beauty
seemed so pure and high as when its glow was chastened by adversity.
    "Youth," said Endicott, "ye stand in an evil case—thou and thy
maiden-wife. Make ready presently, for I am minded that ye shall both
have a token to remember your wedding-day."
    "Stern man," cried the May-lord, "how can I move thee? Were the means
at hand, I would resist to the death; being powerless, I entreat. Do
with me as thou wilt, but let Edith go untouched."
    "Not so," replied the immitigable zealot. "We are not wont to show an
idle courtesy to that sex which requireth the stricter discipline.—What
sayest thou, maid? Shall thy silken bridegroom suffer thy share of the
penalty besides his own?"
    "Be it death," said Edith, "and lay it all on me."
    Truly, as Endicott had said, the poor lovers stood in a woeful case.
Their foes were triumphant, their friends captive and abased, their
home desolate, the benighted wilderness around them, and a rigorous
destiny in the shape of the Puritan leader their only guide. Yet the
deepening twilight could not altogether conceal that the iron man was
softened. He smiled at the fair spectacle of early love; he almost
sighed for the inevitable blight of early hopes.
    "The troubles of life have come hastily on this young couple,"
observed Endicott. "We will see how they comport themselves under
their present trials ere we burden them with greater. If among the
spoil there be any garments of a more decent fashion, let them be put
upon this May-lord and his Lady instead of their glistening vanities.
Look to it, some of you."
    "And shall not the youth's hair be cut?" asked Peter Palfrey, looking
with abhorrence at the lovelock and long glossy curls of the young
man.
    "Crop it forthwith, and that in the true pumpkin-shell fashion,"
answered the captain. "Then bring them along with us, but more gently
than their fellows. There be qualities in the youth which may make him
valiant to fight and sober to toil and pious to pray, and in the
maiden that may fit her to become a mother in our Israel, bringing up
babes in better nurture than her own hath been.—Nor think ye, young
ones, that they are the happiest, even in our lifetime of a moment,
who misspend it in dancing round a Maypole."
    And Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock-foundation
of New England, lifted the wreath of roses from the ruin of the
Maypole and threw it with his own gauntleted hand over the heads of
the Lord and Lady of the May. It was a deed of prophecy. As the moral
gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gayety, even so was their
home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to
it no more. But as their flowery garland was wreathed of the brightest
roses that had grown there, so in the tie that united them were
intertwined all the purest and best of their early joys. They went
heavenward supporting each other along the difficult path which it was
their lot to tread, and never wasted one regretful thought on the
vanities of Merry Mount.

The Gentle Boy
*
    In the course of the year 1656 several of the people called
Quakers—led, as they professed, by the inward movement of the
spirit—made their appearance in New England. Their reputation as
holders of mystic and pernicious principles having spread before them,
the Puritans early endeavored to banish and to prevent the further
intrusion of the rising sect. But the measures by which it was
intended to purge the land of heresy, though more than sufficiently
vigorous, were entirely unsuccessful. The Quakers, esteeming
persecution as a divine call to the post of danger, laid claim to a
holy courage unknown to the Puritans themselves, who had shunned the
cross by providing for the peaceable exercise of their religion in a
distant wilderness. Though it was the singular fact that every nation
of the earth rejected the wandering enthusiasts who practised peace
toward all men, the place of greatest uneasiness and peril, and
therefore in their eyes the most