ety, and attending to its pettiest details with a
scrupulous fidelity which proved that conscience found its province
there. We seem almost to be made spectators of the bustle and fervor of
the old original Passover scenes of the Hebrew exodus. It is refreshing
to pause for a moment over a touch of our common humanity, which we meet
by the way. Winthrop in London "feeds with letters" the wife from whom
he was so often parted. In one of them he tells her that he has
purchased for her the stuff for a "gowne" to be sent by the carrier, and
he adds, "Lett me knowe what triminge I shall send for thy gowne." But
Margaret, who could trust her honored husband in everything else, was a
woman still, and must reserve, not only the rights of her sex, but the
privilege of her own good taste for the fitnesses of things. So she
guardedly replies,--in a postscript, of course,--"When I see the cloth,
I will send word what triminge will serve." In a modest parenthesis of
another letter to her, dated October 29, 1629, he speaks of himself, as
if all by the way, as "beinge chosen by ye Company to be their
Governor." The circumstances of his election and trust, so honorable and
dignified, are happily told with sufficient particularity on our own
Court Records. Governor Cradock, his honored predecessor, not intending
immediate emigration, put the proposition, and announced the result
which gave him such a successor.

Attending frequently upon meetings of the Company, and supervising its
own business as well as his private affairs, all having in view what
must then have been in the scale of the time a gigantic undertaking,
full of vexations and embarrassments, Winthrop seizes upon a few days of
crowded heart-strugglings to make his last visit at the dear homestead,
and then to take of it his eternal farewell. How lovingly and admiringly
do we follow him on his way from London, taking his last view of those
many sweet scenes which were thenceforward to embower in his memory all
the joys of more than forty years! He did not then know for what a
rugged landscape, and for what uncouth habitations, he was to exchange
those fair scenes and the ivy-clad and -festooned churches and cottages
of his dear England. His wife, for reasons of prudence, was to remain
for a while with some of his children, beside his eldest son, and was to
follow him when he had made fit preparation for her. His last letters to
her (and each of many was written as the last, be