dragoons, under Cromwell. But when the ambitious designs of his
leader began to develop themselves, he quitted the army of the
Parliament, and sought a refuge from the strife, which was no
longer holy, among the people of his persuasion in the colony of
Massachusetts. A more worldly consideration had perhaps an
influence in drawing him thither; for New England offered
advantages to men of unprosperous fortunes, as well as to
dissatisfied religionists, and Pearson had hitherto found it
difficult to provide for a wife and increasing family. To this
supposed impurity of motive the more bigoted Puritans were
inclined to impute the removal by death of all the children, for
whose earthly good the father had been over-thoughtful. They had
left their native country blooming like roses, and like roses
they had perished in a foreign soil. Those expounders of the ways
of Providence, who had thus judged their brother, and attributed
his domestic sorrows to his sin, were not more charitable when
they saw him and Dorothy endeavoring to fill up the void in their
hearts by the adoption of an infant of the accursed sect. Nor did
they fail to communicate their disapprobation to Tobias; but the
latter, in reply, merely pointed at the little quiet, lovely boy,
whose appearance and deportment were indeed as powerful arguments
as could possibly have been adduced in his own favor. Even his
beauty, however, and his winning manners, sometimes produced an
effect ultimately unfavorable; for the bigots, when the outer
surfaces of their iron hearts had been softened and again grew
hard, affirmed that no merely natural cause could have so worked
upon them.

Their antipathy to the poor infant was also increased by the ill
success of divers theological discussions, in which it was