of the Pilgrim Fathers, became a sharp thorn in the sides of New England. His character has been depicted in different colours, according as it has been viewed through the medium of romance, or in the uncoloured light of plain history. A charming American writer, Washington Irving, has said of this Indian hero: "With heroic qualities and bold achievements that would have graced a civilised warrior, and have rendered him the theme of the poet, and the historian, he lived a wanderer and a fugitive in his native land, and went down like a lonely barque foundering amid darkness and tempest-without a pitying eye to weep his fall, or a friendly hand to recall his struggle." A less elegant, but we apprehend, in this matter a more trustworthy pen, describes Philip as "capricious, passionate, and untrustworthy ;" and as undoubtedly engaging in plots, which if successful, would have brought destruction on the English colonies. The mutual confidence, which for a time existed between the red aborigines and the white settlers. gave place to mutual suspicion. Wandering tribes suspected those who were building towns close to their sylvan haunts, of a design to exterminate their race; whilst the latter suspected the wanderers of exactly the same purpose. The civilized beat the savage, as they always do in the end; but, for more than five years, Philip kept New England in a state of alarm and agitation.

Troubles about the Massachusetts charter preceded and followed the Indian war. From the beginning it had been interpreted by the colonists as giving them perfect independence of political action, save and except as it required a nominal acknowledgment of the British Crown. The civil wars -the Interregnum, and the Commonwealth of England, were favourable to the claims of self-government, based on the Company's charter; but when the Restoration came, and royal rights were re-asserted, the relationship of Massachusetts to the mother country assumed a different phase. Charles II. asserted a real sovereignty over the people. Disputes arose between the General Council of the colony, and the Privy Council of the King. The old charter was endangered-a new and different one was offered and urged -Royal Commissioners visited Plymouth and Boston, and returned home, the rent between the opposite parties being by this proceeding only made worse. Agents passed to and fro. Documents and debates succeeded one another. At length Massachusetts was humbled. The charter was annulled. The colony, "as a body politic, was now no more."

Under James II. there was a provisional government. Arbitrary measures were pursued by the crown and resisted by the colonists. Things went on from bad to worse, till the revolution of 1688 put an end to the confusion. "And again Englishmen were free and self-governed in the settlements of New England."

In the reign of William III. we meet with another trouble. The good people of Boston were excited by the terrors of witchcraft. A young woman was supposed to be bewitched, and when the Bible, the "Assembly's Catechism," Cotton's "Milk for Babes," "Remarkable Providences," and a book to prove that witches existed were shown the poor creature, she swooned away in "hideous convulsions." Quaker books,

popish books, a prayer book, and a text book had no such effect upon her nervous system. The devil, it is said, would let her read these as long as she liked, and, particularly, she treated the Prayer Book with great respect. The consummate folly of faith in witchcraft extended itself in New England. Ministers and magistrates were infected by it, and one miserable mortal after another-even eight at a time—perished under the executioner's hands.*

In the eighteenth century Boston settled down into a thriving, rich and respectable commercial city, under a royal governor professing the religion of the Church of England, and introducing Episcopalian worship into the old South Church. The original ecclesiastical restrictions melted away. They could not continue after the act of toleration, and in the midst of a community increasing in numbers, in freedom of thought, and in diversity of opinion.

The American war of the last century brought to New England what it had long sought, entire independence of the government of Great Britain, and issued in a republican constitution which separated the State from the Church, and brought to Boston, as to every city and state in North America, perfect religious liberty. Boston is closely connected with the separation of America from England. Into Boston harbour the taxed tea was thrown. In Boston other measures of resistance were concerted.

General Washington, in the discharge of his military duties, repeatedly visited Boston. On the heights near Boston the flag of thirteen stripes was first raised. Within the environs of Boston is Bunker's Hill, where the famous battle was fought and where a column marks the locality of the conflict.

Stories full of quaint humour are told respecting the Bostonians of that period. There was in 1777 a worthy named Mather Byles, a clergyman of a Puritan stock and of a Puritan stamp, taking the Tory side and upholding the royal cause against the popular one. He was denounced at a town meeting, and then tried and sentenced to imprisonment. He persuaded a sentinel placed at his door, at the time of his being a prisoner, to go on an errand for him, and then gravely mounted guard with a musket on his shoulder to keep watch over himself. He was a great punster, and said to a gentleman, who was looking over an extensive prospect from an upper window, "Now you can observe a tory." And when a friend found him sitting in an arm-chair he exclaimed, "You will excuse my rising; I am not one of the rising generation." His odd humour remained to the last; and when visited by two Episcopalian clergymen, who asked how he felt, "I feel," he said, "that I am going where there are no bishops." The following lines occur in a poem of the period, which was of the town":

"There's punning Byles provokes our smiles,

A man of stately parts,

Who visits folks to crack his jokes,

That never mind their hearts.

* "Hutchinson's History of Witchcraft."

The rage

P

With strutting gait, and wig so great,
He walks along the streets,

And throws out wit, or what's like it,

To every one he meets."

It will provoke another smile to read the following note of invitation, dated 1776, belonging, therefore, to the same period, and relating to a custom prevalent in Boston, before vaccination had been introduced, of holding social parties for inoculating people with the small-pox :-"Mr. Storer has invited Mrs. Martin to take the small-pox at his house. If Mrs. Kentworth desires to get rid of her fears in the same way, he will accommodate her in the best way he can. I've several friends that I've invited, and none of them will be more welcome than Mrs. M."

If these anecdotes of Boston-and they could be multiplied-are amusing, later stories, like the earliest ones, are heroic; for perhaps nowhere did the great war in America, which issued in the overthrow of slavery, excite so much enthusiasm as in the metropolis of New England. The privations endured, the sacrifices made, the lives offered up by the chiefs of the city, would make a history full of sublime and touching interest. It is very affecting to see tablets in the Boston churches containing names of citizens who have fallen in patriotic fights.

As we were travelling through the delightful scenery of the State of Vermont, it was our privilege to fall in with a small group of courteous and intelligent travellers, inhabitants of Boston, whose society added much to the pleasure of the journey. In the course of conversation we spoke of the New England States, their origin, and their heroes; and inquired whether the present generation were not proud of their ancestry? We mentioned Bradford, Winthrop, and some others. "Oh," replied one of the gentlemen, we don't care for people who lived so long ago. Indeed, Washington is almost forgotten in Abraham Lincoln." He added: "As to Bradford, I question whether anybody in this car knows anything about him. I will wake my wife, and ask her." Rousing the lady, he inquired: "Do you know who Governor Bradford was?" Rubbing her eyes, she answered: "Did he not live in the days of the witches?" There was a little chronological confusion here; but we were glad to find that our agreeable fellowtraveller had at least heard of the existence of the Plymouth Forefathers. We hope the memory of these colonial founders will never die out in the States of New England. JOHN STOUGHTON.

Ambrose Borely-A True Picture of Huguenot Suffering.

(From Hagenbach's-untranslated-Lectures on Church History.) THERE exists a narrative, by an eye-witness, of the bitter persecutions of the French Huguenots, which affords a graphic specimen of the darker side of French history.

The "History of the old Cévenol was published in 1754, in London, by Ambrose Borely himself, then an aged man of 103 years old, and a refugee in London.

He was the son of a well-to-do citizen of the Cevennes, a district in

the South of France, noted for its inclination to Protestant doctrine. He was the eldest of seven children, who had devotedly pious parents. The family lived in peaceful enjoyment of modest prosperity till the unfortunate era when the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was announced by the mayor. Then the public means of worship were at an end, and the Huguenot liberties also. The dragoons soon came to occupy the best rooms and to enjoy the best fare in this quiet house. The young lad was witness to shocking scenes of abominable usage to his parents and to all the family. At last, finding such treatment unendurable, and the mother being near her time of maternal anxiety, while their provision stores were all consumed, they fled to the neighbouring house of a friend, who then had no soldiers imposed on her. The soldiers now held possession of their house, and when the father attempted to return without his wife, they seized him and hung him up in the chimney, using all sorts of practical jokes on him, of which he died that very day. The young Ambrose was inhumanly tied down in bed, where he could see all his poor father's suffering. He wept and cried so bitterly that at last the soldiers unbound and drove him away.

When the soldiers left the lonely and stripped house the widow returned with the poor orphans to their miserable home. She lived sparingly on what these robbers had not been able to discover, and tried to forget her misery in the Christian training of her children. She dreaded nothing more anxiously than that they should be torn away from her care. Her all was

in the religious salvation of her darlings. Ambrose was now in his fifteenth year, and might have become his mother's protector. He could read and write excellently, for his mother had been his teacher. He had an open mind, a kind well-disposed heart, an expressive countenance, which led. everyone to trust him whom he offered to serve.

But to what occupation should he turn for his life work? His grandfather had been a barrister. Young Borely hoped to succeed in this profession. He introduced himself to a legal practitioner, who received him with friendship, but at once placed before him the edict which forbade all Protestants from becoming barristers. Nor even was this his entire difficulty; but he could not become a lawyer, nor lawyer's clerk, nor a beadle of the courts. The youth, not yet quite discouraged, endeavoured to find an opening with a doctor of medicine. He, however, showed him a royal prohibition of the same kind, which excluded all Huguenots from the practice of medicine. Borely vainly asked in his surprise whether Æsculapius, Hippocrates and Galen were all Catholics.

"Well," thought the yet not dispirited youth, "if I cannot be a doctor I will be an apothecary," and went to call on an apothecary for this purpose. But here also an edict was beforehand with him, which declared that no Protestant could be apothecary or surgeon; and on further inquiry he found he could not even be a servant in such a vocation, as in these professions it was forbidden to employ Protestant servants. He had now the idea of going into the army, but his mother showed him that as a Huguenot he would not be accepted, and she trembled to think of his being associated with those whose rudeness and cruelty they had so bitterly suffered.

Ambrose would not shock his mother by this step, so he sought an engagement in an honourable trade, and spoke to a friend on the subject. This friend also pointed to a royal edict which expressly forbade Huguenots to be printers, booksellers, or goldsmiths. Still there were many other trades which were not directly forbidden, but the masters were in all these ordered to take no Protestant apprentices, so that he could not learn them. There was no use in further inquiry. The poor young Cévenol was in the most painful embarrassment.

To this was presently added the distress of his mother and the other children. The priests had spied out that these children were being trained by their mother in Calvin's religion. They required that they should attend the Catholic instruction, according to the royal edict, which sentenced all to heavy fines who declined such instruction. The poor mother submitted readily to the fine to preserve her children uncontaminated, but they felt severely the diminution of the means of living.

At last their oppressors remembered an edict, which disqualified widows who stubbornly withdrew their children from Catholic instruction, from any longer managing their own affairs. A guardian was appointed over her small property, and she was only allowed a wretched widow's pension out of it. Even that she was not long permitted to enjoy. What she had so long and anxiously dreaded she had now to endure. The children (except Ambrose) were really torn away from her, and sent to a convent in a far distant city, where they were made Catholics by force.

The only comfort of the deeply-afflicted widow was now her Ambrose, the only one who remained with her in her distress. Even the youngest, Benjamin, a child of seven, was dragged from his mother and placed in a convent. The spiritual fathers coaxed the child with sweetmeats and small presents till they induced him to say his childish recantation before a congregation of the faithful. The mother, when she heard these tidings of her lovely darling, refused to believe that the confession of a child of seven could be legally received. She well knew an edict which made children of 12 responsible in this respect, but she was now shown a later law, by which children five years younger than in the former edict were made capable of conversion.

Beside Ambrose, there was also an old uncle who was the stay of the family. Every inducement had been resorted to for his conversion. When he lay sick in bed, four drummers who were quartered on him, kept up a perpetual noise. He bore this torture for forty-eight hours, and then as he resisted, they took a great iron kettle and beat him with it on the head. The poor trembling patient at last was persuaded to sign a form of abjuration. But from that hour, his conscience gave him no rest. He reproached himself as a traitor to the Truth. But lo! an ordinance forbade the newly converted, on pain of being sent to the galleys, to "express any repentance because of their conversion." The solitude in which the uncle of Borely lived, and his mournful face, sufficiently betrayed his sorrow of heart. One day the family learnt that he had been imprisoned and sent away to the galleys.

Meanwhile the barrister whose service young Borely had first sought,