Best of all the gentle Margaret did not fail her husband in this hour of need. Letters full of cheer and sympathy found their way to him from Groton Manor and in them all she expressed conviction that the good Lord would "certainly bless us in our intended purpose. His tender appreciation of her pluck is reflected in all the letters he sent her during the months preceding his departure. "I must now begin to prepare thee for our long parting, which grow very near," he writes early in January, 1629. "I know not how to deal with thee by arguments; for if thou wert as wise and patient as ever woman was, yet it must needs be a great trial to thee and the greater because I am so dear to thee;" and then he goes on to point out that she must find her comfort in religion, as where else could she find it, poor thing! when the husband with whose soul hers was peculiarly knit was for venturing to a foreign land, leaving her behind. Her replies to his brave attempts at consolation are indeed touching, and immensely pathetic also are his answers. He has been arranging to leave with friends fifteen hundred pounds for her support until she should be able to follow him to the New

World and now he writes, "MY SWEET WIFE, The Lord hath oft brought us together with comfort, when we have been long absent; and if it be good for us he will do so still. When I was in Ireland he brought us together again. When I was sick here in London he restored us together again. How many dangers, near death, hast thou been in thyself! and yet the Lord hath granted me to enjoy thee still. If he did not watch over us we need not go over sea to seek death or misery: we should meet it at every step, in every journey. And is not he a God abroad as well as at home? Is not his power and providense the same in New England as it hath been in Old England? My good wife, trust in the Lord, whom thou hast found faithful. He will be better to thee than any husband and will restore thee thy husband with advantage. But I kiss my sweet wife and bless thee and all ours and rest Thine ever Jo. WINTHROP

February 14, 1629 — Thou must be my valentine .

The picture of him whom we are wont to call "the stern John Winthrop " remembering, even in the midst of hurried and troubled preparations to embark for the New World woman's perennial sentiment concerning such

festivals as St. Valentine's Day is so striking as to be worth bearing in mind. And when we have placed alongside of it the series of farewell letters sent to his wife from Cowes and the Isle of Wight where the ships were detained by bad weather, we have a complete comprehension of one side of the man's character. "Mondays and Fridays, at five of the clock at night, we shall meet in spirit till we meet in person," he promises her. Shakespeare, not long before, had put the same thought into the mouth of Imogen, when, on having parted with Posthumus, she complains that they had been torn apart

"Ere I could tell him,

How would I think on him, at certain hours,
Such thoughts, and such;

... or have charged him,

At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
To encounter me with orisons; for then

I am in heaven for him."

But Posthumus, as Robert C. Winthrop, the editor of his progenitor's remarkable letters, points out, was not in his forty-third year, as was the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; nor Imogen in her thirty-ninth. Moreover, one can scarcely fancy either of Shakespeare's lovers admitting, as Winthrop does in

one of the first New England letters which he sent his wife, "I own with sorrow that much business hath made me too often forget Mondays and Fridays."

III

ST. BOTOLPH'S TOWN IN OLD ENGLAND AND NEW

NOWADAYS embarking from old England for the new seems no great matter. But in that spring of 1630 when Winthrop's little fleet sailed from Cowes travelling was quite a different proposition. For it was certain that the voyage would be very long and usually it was dangerous also. On this particular occasion it took seventy-six days and was attended by all those "perils of the deep" against which some of us still have the good sense to pray. Winthrop's vessel was called the Arbella in compliment to Lady Arbella Johnson, who was one of its passengers, and among the other ships which brought over this Company of some eight hundred souls was the Mayflower, consecrated in every New England heart as the carrier, a decade earlier, of the Pilgrims of Plymouth. During the voyage Governor Winthrop wrote the simple beginnings of what is known as his "History of New England," a

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