opposite page.]

[Footnote 2: This grant had no boundary. Each settler might have 100
acres. Fifteen hundred acres were set aside for public buildings.]

[Footnote 3: Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_, pp. 80-87; Palfrey's
_New England_, Vol. I, pp. 176-232; Thatcher's _History of the Town of
Plymouth_.]

[Illustration: Fragment of _History of the Plymouth Plantation_.]

%35. A Puritan Colony proposed.%--Among those who obtained such
rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape
Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a
place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man in Dorchester who was
not discouraged by failure. He was John White, a Puritan rector. What
had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed
to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential
Puritans. The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an
association was formed, and a tract of land was bought from the Council
for New England.

%36. The "Sea to Sea" Grant%.--Concerning the interior of our
continent absolutely nothing was known. Nobody supposed it was more than
half as wide as it really is. The grant to the association, therefore,
stretched from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles
south of the Charles River, along these rivers to their sources, and
then westward across the continent from sea to sea.[1]

[Footnote 1: You will notice that when this grant was made in 1628 the