g the people of
his persuasion in the colony of Massachusetts. A more worldly
consideration had perhaps an influence in drawing him thither, for New
England offered advantages to men of unprosperous fortunes as well as
to dissatisfied religionists, and Pearson had hitherto found it
difficult to provide for a wife and increasing family. To this
supposed impurity of motive the more bigoted Puritans were inclined to
impute the removal by death of all the children for whose earthly good
the father had been over-thoughtful. They had left their native
country blooming like roses, and like roses they had perished in a
foreign soil. Those expounders of the ways of Providence, who had thus
judged their brother and attributed his domestic sorrows to his sin,
were not more charitable when they saw him and Dorothy endeavoring to
fill up the void in their hearts by the adoption of an infant of the
accursed sect. Nor did they fail to communicate their disapprobation
to Tobias, but the latter in reply merely pointed at the little quiet,
lovely boy, whose appearance and deportment were indeed as powerful
arguments as could possibly have been adduced in his own favor. Even
his beauty, however, and his winning manners sometimes produced an
effect ultimately unfavorable; for the bigots, when the outer surfaces
of their iron hearts had been softened and again grew hard, affirmed
that no merely natural cause could have so worked upon them. Their
antipathy to the poor infant was also increased by the ill-success of
divers theological discussions in which it was attempted to convince
him of the errors of his sect. Ilbrahim, it is true, was not a skilful
controversialist, but the feeling of his religion was strong as
instinct in him, and he could neither be enticed nor driven from the
faith which his father had died for.

The odium of this stubbornness was shared in a great measure by the
child's protectors, insomuch that Tobias and Dorothy very shortly
began to experience a most bitter species of persecution in the cold
regards of many a friend whom they had valued. The common people
manifested their opinions more openly. Pearson was a man of some
consideration, being a representative to the General Court and an
approved lieutenant in the train-bands, yet within a week after his
adoption of Ilbrahim he had been both hissed and hooted. Once, also,
when walking through a solitary piece of woods, he heard a loud voice
from some invisible speake