hundred and five persons, divided into twenty-one families. Among these
were John Whitmarsh, his wife Alice, and four children; Robert Lovell,
husbandman, with his good wife Elizabeth and children, two of whom,
Ellen and James, were year-old twins; Edward Poole and family; Henry
Kingman, Thomas Holbrook, Richard Porter, and not least of all, Zachary
Bicknell, his wife Agnes, their son John, and servant John Kitchen.

Families these,--all on board,--households, treasures, all worldly
estates, and best of all the rich sympathies and supports of united,
trusting hearts, daring to face the perils of an ocean-passage of
forty-six days' duration, and the new, strange life in the wilds of
America, that they might prove their faith in each other, in their
principles, and in God. "He setteth the solitary in families," says the
Psalmist; and the truth was never better illustrated than in the
isolated and weary life of our ancestry, two and a half centuries ago.

To the Pilgrim and the Puritan, wife, children, house, home, family,
church, were the most precious possessions. Nothing human could divorce
ties which nature had so strongly woven. And whenever we think of our
honored ancestry, it is not as individual adventurers; but we see the
good-man, the good-wife, and their children, as the representatives of
the great body of those, who with them planted homes, families, society,
civilization, in the Western World. They came together, or if alone, to
pioneer the way for wife and children or sweetheart by the next ship,
and they came to stay, as witness the names of the old families of
Plymouth, Weymouth, Salem, Boston, Dorchester, in the leading circles of
wealth and social position in all of these old towns. "Behold," says Dr.
Bushnell, "the Mayflower, rounding now the southern cape of England,
filled with husbands and wives and children; families of righteous men,
under covenant with God and each other to lay some good foundation for