Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
[Illustration: “_with her sweeping brocades and a cushion towering upon her powdered head_”]
THEIR true stories herein set forth by Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford Miss Louise Imogen Guiney and Miss Alice Brown
With many little picturings authentic and fanciful by Edmund H Garrett and published by Little Brown and Company Boston 1894
University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
Martha Hilton. “With her sweeping brocades and a cushion towering upon her powdered head” _Frontispiece._
“In his rough cradle by the sounding sea” 17
“Or in calmer moments reading the blessed promises of His word” 29
“Ponds set like jewels in the ring of the green woods” 43
“Up-stairs and down-stairs ran the streets” 64
“The solid dignity of the old Town House” 69
“Bravely attired in small clothes and wigs” 81
“She learned to play on the harpsichord” 83
“Tragic battlings of heart and conscience” 87
“All the more did she turn to Frankland” 89
“The giant box and a few ancient trees” 92
“The opera was the finest on the continent” 97
“Married a wealthy banker of Chichester” 104
“The little figure with the swishing bucket” 108
“Nor need link herself with the neighboring yokel whom Providence had assigned her” 113
“He had the mortification to see her prefer one Shortridge, a mechanic” 117
“Her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms” 123
“Fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning” 131
“Wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders” 133
Moll Pitcher’s house and the graveyard 157
Circle Street and Floyd Ireson’s house 161
“This is where the sailors in pigtails and petticoats used to be” 165
Decorative designs Title, 7, 8, 9, 12, 105, 106, 134, 175
“The swallow with summer Will wing o’er the seas, The wind that I sigh to Will visit thy trees. The ship that it hastens Thy ports will contain, But me—I shall never See England again!”
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 history.