n offered, he was ready to join the bold
Captain Kidd with alacrity.

The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance. It was the
century of settlement. In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had
led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the _Susan Constant_ with
two smaller ships, containing a handful of colonists. They settled on
the James River. Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and
free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain. In him John Oxenham lived
again. We all know the story of Captain John Smith. He began his
career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and
rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures. Sometimes he was a
prisoner of the Indians. Once, if his own account is true, he was
rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called
Princess--or Lady Rebecca. He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the
name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod. Such histories,
of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous
spirit and the romance of the West. The dream of _finding_ gold had
vanished: what belonged to the present were the things done and
suffered in His Majesty's plantations with all that they suggested. It
is most certain that in every age there are thousands who continually
yearn for the 'way of war' and the life of battle. Mostly, they fail
in their ambitions because in these times the nations fear war. In the
seventeenth century there was always good fighting to be got somewhere
in Europe; if everything else failed there were the American Colonies
and the Indians--plenty of fighting always among the Indians.

Besides the romance of war there was the romance of religious freedom.
Everybody in America knows the story of the _Mayflower_ and her
Pilgrims in 1620, and the coming of the Puritans in 1630 under John
Winthrop and the Massachusetts Company. I suppose, also, that all
Americans know of the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, and of Lord Baltimore's
Catholic, but tolerant, colony of Maryland. They know as well the very
odd story of Carolina and its 'Lords Proprietors' and the aristocratic
form of government attempted there; of the Quakers in Pennsylvania,
and the Temperance Colony of Georgia. One may recall as well the
influx of Germans by thousands in the early part of the eighteenth
century, and the first immigration of Irish Presbyterians, the flower
of the Irish nation, driven abroad by the stupidity and fanaticism of
thei