sent around by water to meet them, but early in November
the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river
blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of
the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle
perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts.
Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were
so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They
succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston.
Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow
over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the
next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number,
led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle,
made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley. Women and children took
part in this pleasant summer journey; Mrs. Hooker, the pastor's wife,
being too ill to walk, was carried on a litter. Thus, in the memorable
year in which our great university was born, did Cambridge become, in
the true Greek sense of a much-abused word, the _metropolis_ or "mother
town" of Hartford. The migration at once became strong in numbers.
During the past twelvemonth a score of ships had brought from England
to Massachusetts more than 3000 souls, and so great an accession made
further movement easy. Hooker's pilgrims were soon followed by the
Dorchester and Watertown congregations, and by the next May 800 people
were living in Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. As we read of these
movements, not of individuals, but of organic communities, united in
allegiance to a church and its pastor, and fervid with the instinct
of self-government, we seem to see Greek history renewed, but with
centuries of added political training. For one year a board of
commissioners from Massachusetts governed the new towns, but at the end
of that time the towns chose representatives and held a General Court at
Hartford, and thus the separate existence of Connecticut was begun. As
for Springfield, which was settled about the same time by a party from
Roxbury, it remained for some years doubtful to which state it belonged.
At the opening session of the General Court, May 31,1638, Mr. Hooker
preached a sermon of won