othing. What was there I could do? I had
written by the Due Return to Sir Edwyn, and to my cousin, the Earl
of Northumberland. The King hated Sir Edwyn as he hated tobacco and
witchcraft. "Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" had been his
passionate words to the Company the year before. A certain fifth of
November had despoiled my Lord of Northumberland of wealth, fame, and
influence. Small hope there was in those two. That the Governor and
Council, remembering old dangers shared, wished me well I did not doubt,
but that was all. Yeardley had done all he could do, more than most men
would have dared to do, in procuring this delay. There was no further
help in him; nor would I have asked it. Already out of favor with the
Warwick faction, he had risked enough for me and mine. I could not flee
with my wife to the Indians, exposing her, perhaps, to a death by
fierce tortures; moreover, Opechancanough had of late strangely taken to
returning to the settlements those runaway servants and fugitives from
justice which before we had demanded from him in vain. If even it had
been possible to run the gauntlet of the Indian villages, war parties,
and hunting bands, what would have been before us but endless forest and
a winter which for us would have had no spring? I could not see her die
of hunger and cold, or by the teeth of the wolves. I could not do what I
should have liked to do,--take, single-handed, that King's ship with
its sturdy crew and sail with her south and ever southwards, before us
nothing more formidable than Spanish ships, and beyond them blue waters,
spice winds, new lands, strange islands of the blest.

There seemed naught that I could do, naught that she could do. Our Fate
had us by the hands, and held us fast. We stood still, and the days came
and went like dreams.

While the Assembly was in session I had my part to act as Burgess from
my hundred. Each day I sat with my fellows in the church, facing the
Governor in his great velvet chair, the Council on either hand, and
listened to the droning of old Twine, the clerk, like the droning of the
bees without the window; to the chant of the sergeant-at-arms; to long
and windy discourses from men who planted better than they spoke; to
remarks by the Secretary, witty, crammed with Latin and traveled talk;
to the Governor's slow, weighty words. At Weyanoke we had had trouble
with the Indians. I was one who loved them not and had fought them
well, for which re