The Women of the Mayflower and Women of Plymouth Colony

Three hundred and a few more years ago the Great North Road leading from London to Edinburgh ran through and by an English village in Nottinghamshire just as it had done three hundred years earlier than that and as it has these three hundred years. The streets of the village ran toward it and into it as brooks flow to a river, it being the main thoroughfare of travel and therefore source of all outside interests for the inhabitants of the village.

At the corner as one could say, of one of these little streets or roads where it joined the Great Road, one spring day of the sixteenth century, we might see a group of some of the villagers, young people principally, and it is plain some event of unusual interest has called them together; they are laughing and waving to a young man who rides away from them down the road, a friend who has been one of them from childhood and popular as evidenced by the number who have been wishing him a safe journey and all the usual farewells of any time and place. This young man with the pleasing face and manner is the son of the postmaster of the village and he goes to college; his erstwhile companions gaze after his retreating figure down the Great Road through the meadows and farm lands and there is one girl looks the longest—a girl named Mary.

Other times other manners in some things—yet even today in another country village we have seen the postmaster’s son leave home for college, not on horseback but in an automobile, and a gay crowd of his friends seeing him off, his presence to be missed in much the same degree as among those we are now viewing with the mind’s eye. Though time and circumstance be the result of the passing of three hundred years, human nature remains as unchanged as the sky and sea; the student of the present whom we mention may be cousin of a Cabinet official, that scarcely is remembered at the moment, neither is it thought of that the boy who rides on the Great Northern Road is a member of one of the most substantial county families, with powerful friends ecclesiastical and lay. As the turn of the road will soon take him from sight, he looks back at the group watching him for a final wave of his hat, then rides on towards his destination, Cambridge, thinking, perhaps, of the gentle Mary, whom we have noted, whose fine character and winning ways are already an influence with him and not thinking at all, or knowing, of another Mary who is to be perhaps an equal if not more potent influence in his life—a woman in as great a contrast in rank and circumstance as the difference may be between a queen and a village maid.