Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/482

3, 1859.]



and his wife Patience crossed the Atlantic, beyond which Scotch Covenanters and French Huguenots were fain to wander. They reached that America which was still in its vastness virgin soil, but in which town-steads and meeting-houses and governors’ mansions were fast rising in many quarters. They tarried at one of those youthful log-built cities, among the pumpkin-beds and bean-fields, and closing around them in the distance the shades of the great forest from which the dusky Indian, with his war-paint and his poisoned arrows, stalked and traded warily with the settlers, and through which John Elliot journeyed to reach the tribes with the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith. There stood their own miniature gables round the centre chimney and the shingled roof-tree, beneath which they took up their abode, while Benjamin Harris easily established his trade among the intellectual wants of the thoughtful population.

A community of earnest, devout men, so bent upon purity that they condescended in their turn to pile the faggots for witch hags, and lash, brand, and hang wretched Quaker men and women, it might have been thought that it would have been congenial to the serious, storm-tossed young couple; but even here there were exceptions.

Benjamin Harris, a Nonconformist’s son, reared as it were under penalty, was one of those true men, who, whatever the nature or origin of their defects, are capable of receiving light from every quarter and for all time. It has been seen that the harshness of his youth was mellowing amidst crosses, privations, and persecutions; how much more here, where his life was full, his love, his friend, his godliness, morality, and independence no longer grievously offended. Another motive: Harris had been born a Londoner, and to London in those days, Nature, primitive and fresh from God’s hand, as it lingers on the moors and the mountains, was