family. Prior to December 20, 1620, New-England life had never seen a
civilized family or felt its influences. It is true that the Icelandic
Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with
a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward
in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, wintered in
Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor
has revealed their temporary settlement. Thither sailed Eric's son,
Thorstein, with his young and beautiful wife, Gudrida, and their
twenty-five companions, the following year. His death occurred, and put
an end to the expedition, which Thorfinn took up with his marriage to
the young widow, Gudrida; with his bride and one hundred and sixty-five
persons (five of them young married women), they spent three years on
the shores of the Narragansett Bay, where Snorre, the _first_ white
child, was born,--the progenitor of the great Danish sculptor,
Thorwaldsen. But this is tradition, not history. Later still, came other
adventurers to seek fortunes in the New World, but they came as
individuals,--young, adventurous men, with all to gain and nothing to
lose, and, if successful, to return with gold or fame, as the reward of
their sacrifice and daring.

Six hundred years pass, and a colony of one hundred and five men, not a
woman in the company, sailed from England for America, and landed at
Jamestown, Virginia. Within six months half of the immigrants had
perished, and only for the courage and bravery of John Smith, the whole
would have met a sad fate. The first European woman seen on the banks of
the James was the wife of one of the seventy Virginia colonists who came
later, and her maid, Anne Burroughs, who helped to give permanency and
character to a fugitive settlement in a colony, which waited two hundred
and fifty years to learn the value of a New-England home, and to
appreciate the civilization which sprang up in a New-England town,