Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. " My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth ; But higher far my proud pretensions rise, The eon of parents passed into the skies." Cowpeh. The original ancestor of Mr. Athcrton in New England was one of the earliest of those who sacrificed " home " — as they loved to call the land of their nativity — as soon as they discovered that the hopes they had formed for the success of Presbytcrianism in England, under the auspices of James I., at his accession, were doomed to be disappointed by that faithless and inconsistent king, and man without common sense. Accordingly, his own was one of those associated families which, in the year of our Lord, 1633, — or thirteen years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, — landed upon these shores, which were henceforth to prove to them an asylum and a dwelling-place. Nor did they halt long in their march through the unbroken and " howling wilderness," until they had reached the territory of their appointed habitation, which no human steps, save those of the forest-hunter, had ever before trodden. And this wild and inhospitable region, beyond the pale of Christian sight or sound, filled with unknown dangers and dedicated to certain miseries, — in memory of that quiet village, the home of most or of all, that village whose cherished scenes and buried hopes still clung so fondly to their hearts,—they lovingly welcomed as Easti'ord ; bythat familiar name, — their Eastford now, instead of that, which had so mournfully faded from their straining eyen, behind those blue, forlorn, unfathomable depths, higher and higher up towering, of an ocean henceforth to them impassable and relentless. , It was not, however, to escape religious persecution alone, that these adventurous sp...