a high-toned Christian aim for all the members of his
family. The son's course indicated rather profitlessness and
recklessness than vice. He connected himself with an enterprise at
Barbadoes. He drew heavily on his father's resources for money, and
returned him some tobacco, which the father very frankly writes to him
was "very ill-conditioned, foul, & full of stalks, & evil-colored." He
came over in the same expedition, though not in the same ship, with his
father, and was accidentally drowned at Salem, July 2, 1630. In the
first letter which the good Governor wrote to his wife after his landing
here, dated "Charlestown, July 16, 1630," are these sentences:--"We have
met with many sad & discomfortable things, as thou shalt hear after; &
ye Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. My
son Henry! my son Henry! ah, poor child!" While the father was writing
from London to this son, then supposed to be at Barbadoes, he had other
matters of anxiety. His endeared brother-in-law, Fones, died, April 15,
1629, and four days afterwards Winthrop was called to part, at Groton,
with his venerated mother, who died under the roof where she had lived
so happily and graciously with his own family in his successive sorrows
and delights.

The loss or resignation of his office, with the giving up of his
law-chamber in London, and his evident premonitions of the sore troubles
in affairs of Church and State which were soon to convulse his native
land, doubtless guided him to a decision, some of the stages and
incidents of which have left no record for us. Enough, however, of the
process may still be traced among papers which have recently come to
light, to open to us its inner workings, and to explain its development.
A ride with his brother Downing into Lincolnshire, July 28, 1629, finds
an entry in Winthrop's "Experiences," that it may mark his gratitude to
the Providence which preserved his life, when, as he writes, "my horse
fell under me in a bogge in the fennes, so as I was allmost to ye
waiste in water." Beyond all doubt this ride was taken by the
sympathizing travellers on a prearranged visit to Isaac Johnson, another
of the New-England worthies, at Sempringham, on business connected with
the Massachusetts enterprise. But the first recovered and extant
document which proves that Winthrop was committing himself to the great
work is a letter of his son John's, dated London, August 21, 1629, in
reply to one from