or too difficult to
daunt him. He would attack with the utmost daring the hardest or the
humblest task. He was absolutely loyal to the interest of the Colony,
and during that first dreadful winter when he was among the very few who
were not stricken with sickness, he tended the others day and night,
"unceasing in his loving care." As in many audacious characters this
sweeter side of his nature does not seem to have been fully appreciated
by his contemporaries, and we have the letter in which Robinson, that
"most learned, polished and modest spirit," writes to Bradford, and
warns him to have care about Standish. He loves him right well, and is
persuaded that God has given him to them in mercy and for much good, if
he is used aright; but he fears that there may be wanting in him "that
tenderness of the life of man (made after God's image) which is meet."
This warning doubtless flattered Standish, but Robinson's later
criticism of his methods at Weymouth hurt the little captain cruelly. He
seems to have cherished an intense affection for the Leyden pastor,
such as valorous natures often feel for meditative ones, and that
Robinson died before he--Standish--could justify himself was a deep
grief to the soldier to whom mere physical hardships were as nothing. We
do not know a great deal about this relationship between the two men: in
this as in so many cases the intimate stories of these men and women,
"also their love, and their hatred, and their envy is now perished." But
we do know that thirty years later when the gallant captain lay dying he
wrote in his will: "I give three pounds to Mercy Robinson, whom I
tenderly love for her grandfather's sake." Surely one feels the touching
eloquence of this brief sentence the fitting close of a life not only
heroic in action, but deeply sensitive in sentiment.

He died on his farm in Duxbury in 1656 when he was seventy-three, and
the Myles Standish Monument on Captain's Hill, three hundred and ten
feet above the bay, is no more conspicuous than his knightly and tender
life among the people he elected to serve. His two wives, and also
Priscilla and John Alden, for whom he entertained such lively love and
equally lively fury, all are buried here--the Captain's last home
fittingly marked by four cannon and a sturdy boulder.

Not only for Standish and Alden is Duxbury famous. The beloved William
Brewster himself moved to this new settlement, and up to a few years ago
the traces of the w