through the agency of a New-England family.

An experience similar to that of the Virginia settlers--disappointment,
hardship, death--attended the immigrants who, under George Popham,
Raleigh, and Gilbert, attempted to make a permanent home on the coast of
Maine, but their house was a log camp, with not a solitary woman to
light its gloom or cheer its occupants. Failure, defeat, and death were
the inevitable consequences. There was no family, and there could be no
permanency of civilization.

The planting of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies was of another
sort. Whole families embarked on board the Mayflower, the Fortune, the
Ann, the Mary and John, and other ships that brought their precious
freight in safety to a New World. Of the one hundred and one persons who
came in the Mayflower, in 1620, twenty-eight were females, and eighteen
were wives and mothers. They did not leave their homes, in the truest
sense,--they brought them with them. Their household goods and
hearthstone gods were all snugly stowed beneath the decks of the
historic ship, and the multitude of Mayflower relics, now held in
precious regard in public and private collections, but testify to the
immense inventory of that one little ship of almost fabulous carrying
capacity. To the compact signed in Plymouth harbor, in 1620, John Carver
signs eight persons, whom he represents; Edward Winslow, five; William
Brewster, six; William Mullins, five; William White, five; Stephen
Hopkins, Edward Fuller, and John Turner, each, eight; John Chilton,
three,--one of whom, his daughter Mary, was the first woman, as
tradition says, to jump from the boat upon Plymouth Rock. In the
Weymouth Company, under the leadership of the Reverend Joseph Hull, who
set sail from Old Weymouth, England, on the twentieth of March, 1635,
and landed at Wessaguscus,--now Weymouth, Massachusetts,--there were one