should be associated with one of the most
romantic, most striking, names in the Plymouth Colony. There are few
more picturesque personalities in our early history than Myles Standish.
Small in stature, fiery in spirit, a terror to the Indians, and a strong
arm to the Pilgrims, there is no doubt that his determination to live in
Duxbury--which he named for Duxborough Hall, his ancestral home in
Lancashire--went far in obtaining for it a separate incorporation and a
separate church. This was the first definite offshoot from the Plymouth
Colony, and was accompanied by the usual maternal fears. While he could
not forbid them going to Duxbury to settle, yet, when they asked for a
separate incorporation and church, Bradford granted it most unwillingly.
He voiced the general sentiment when he wrote that such a separation
presaged the ruin of the church "& will provoke y^e Lord's displeasure
against them."

However, such unkind predictions in no wise bothered the sturdy little
group who moved over to the new location, needing room for their cattle
and their gardens, and most of all a sense of freedom from the
restrictions of the mother colony. The son of Elder Brewster went, and
in time the Elder himself, and so did John Alden and his wife Priscilla,
whose courtship has been so well told by Longfellow that it needs no
further embellishing here. On the grassy knoll where John and Priscilla
built their home in 1631, their grandson built the cottage which now
stands--the property of the Alden Kindred Association. John Alden seems
to have been an attractive young fellow--it is easy to see why Priscilla
Mullins preferred him to the swart, truculent widower--but from our
point of view John Alden's chief claim to fame is that he was a friend
of Myles Standish.

Let us, as we pay our respects to Duxbury, pause for a moment and recall
some of the courageous adventures, some of the brave traits and some of
the tender ones, which make up our memory of this doughty military
commander. In the first place, we must remember that he was never a
member of the church of the Pilgrims: there is even a question if he
were not--like the rest of his family in Lancashire--a Roman Catholic;
and this immediately places him in a position of peculiar distinction.
From the first his mission was not along ecclesiastical lines, but along
military and civil ones. The early histories are full of his intrepid
deeds: there was never an expedition too dangerous