honorable body of people of the present age.

Horrified by their blasphemies and indecencies, the authorities of
Massachusetts passed some cruel laws. At first they forbade all persons
"harboring Quakers," imposing severe penalties for each offence, then
followed mild punishment on the Friends themselves. These proving
ineffectual, the Puritans passed laws which authorized the cropping of
the ears, boring the tongues with hot irons, and hanging on the gibbet
offending Quakers.

Even these terrible laws could not keep them away. On a bright October
day in 1659, two young men named William Robinson and Marmaduke
Stevenson, with Mary Dyer, wife of the Secretary of State of Rhode
Island, were led from the Boston jail, with ropes around their necks and
guarded by soldiers, to be hanged on Boston Common. Mary walked between
her companions hand in hand to the gallows, where, in the presence of
Governor Endicott, the two young men were hung. Mary was unmoved by the
spectacle. She was given into the care of her son, who came from Rhode
Island to plead for her life, and went away with him; but the next
spring this foolish woman returned and began preaching and was herself
hung on Boston Common.

The severity of these laws caused a revulsion of public sentiment. The
Quakers stoutly maintained their course, and were regarded by the more
thoughtful as real martyrs for conscience sake, and, in 1661, the severe
laws against them were repealed. Puritanism, which had flourished under
republicanism in England, with the restoration of the Stuarts was
threatened, and doubtless fear of the vengeance of the church party
caused the New Englanders to temper their laws.

A restless spirit on the part of the New Englanders with an uneasy
feeling in regard to the result of the restoration caused many to
emigrate to Carolinia, which was a mysterious, far-away land where
everybody lived at peace. Removed from the grasp of kings and tyrants,
many went to the infant town planted on Old-town Creek, near the south
side of Cape Fear River. However, the Carolinias were growing from
fugitive settlements into commonwealths, and, in 1666, William Drummond,
the friend of John Stevens, was appointed governor of North Carolinia.

Claybourne, who, after a struggle of twenty years, had succeeded in
conquering Maryland, saw, with the decline of the commonwealth of
England, his own hopes go down. In 1658, the Catholics of St. Mary's and
the Puritans of St. Le