A Puritan home . afterward) or that I should have lived to have seene or heard of the same but it is the Lord's doing and ought to be marvellous in our eyes. "Every plante which our heavenly father hath not planted (saith our Saviour) shall be rooted out. I have snared thee and thou art taken, O Babell [Bishops] and thou wast not aware, thou art found, and also caught, because thou hast striven against the Lord." Do you not now see the fruits of your labours O all yee servants of the Lord, that have suffered for his truth, and have been faithful witnesses of the same, and ye little handfull among the rest, the least among the thousands of Israel? For yee not only had a seede time, but many of you have seen the joyfull harvest. Should you not then rejoyse, yea and again rejoyse, and say Hallelujah, salvation and glory and honour and power be to the Lord our God; for true and righteous are his judgments. Bradford's postscript, with its cry of triumph, is worth considering, for it gives dramatic unity to the lives of the Pilgrims. They had a definite program, and it was accomplished. Within a single lifetime it was possible to see the seed-sowing and the harvest. And the harvest was greater than any of the little company had imagined to be possible. There had come to Bradford the news of the Battle of Naseby, the storming of Bristol, and the surrender of Charles to the Scots. And with the political and military success there was the triumph of the religious ideas of the Puritans. Parliament had on the advice of the assembly of divines revolutionized the discipline of the church. No more should the sign of the cross be used in baptism, the communion table should be set in the body of the church, the ring should not be used in marriage, there should be no wearing of vestments, no prescribed forms of prayer, no keeping of saints' days. All the points for which Plymouth and Salem in the days of adversity had contended had been accepted by those who ruled all England. The story has a dramatic completeness like that of the antislavery movement or the unification of Italy. Let us not blur the outlines of the picture by confusing it with ideas that belong to another era. One who watched at the death-bed of Oliver Cromwell, and who heard him praying, said "a public spirit to God's cause did breathe in him to the very last." In these words are expressed the soul of the Puritan Revolution. The men who struggled in behalf of the English Commonwealth believed that they knew what God's cause was. It was not a private virtue; it was large and public, and to be expressed in civil institutions for whose maintenance they were directly responsible. They were ardent patriots and believed that to their own nation, in their own time, was given the honor of setting up a government in accordance with the revealed will of God. Let us think of them in the moments when they were filled with the glowing sense of the immediate realization of their ideal. Milton expressed their mood: Journeys end in lovers meeting Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing some new and great period in the Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen. In insisting that we can understand the New England Puritans only when we think of them as Englishmen profoundly interested in the great movement of their own day, we are not denying their influence in the development of American character. We are only saying that in order to trace that influence we must follow the main current of history rather than any parochial side channels. We have as our inheritance, which we share with our British brethren, the whole Puritan movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Physical geography has little to do in the transmission of thought. Ideas are not, like cats, attached to places. They follow persons. The man of the Pilgrim company best beloved and longest remembered was the pastor, John Robinson, who crossed the sea only in spirit. Hampden and Pym and Eliot and Baxter and Milton and Cromwell have left a deeper impress upon America than all the Mathers. To-day we are better able to appreciate the efforts of the Puritan than were our immediate predecessors. We cannot accept his answers, but we are beginning to ask the same kind of questions. We are less sure than we used to be that religion and politics can be kept in separate compartments. We are not altogether satisfied with purely secular solutions of social problems. We hear people talking again about a community church. In an amendment to the Constitution enforcing prohibition we have gone further than the Puritan Commonwealth did in looking after the morals of the people. The individual conscience is more and more reinforced by a social conscience that finds its expression in law. Our philosophers have been telling us that religion is loyalty to a beloved community. All this does not indicate a return to the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, but it makes seventeenth-century Puritanism more intellig:ble to us. The Drought By DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH Illustrations by Robert E. Johnston That people are but creatures of circumstance is the theme of this story. The heat or cold or the rainfall of a day may change the career or movements of a person's life. B ESSIE HICKSON gazed in despair at her little vegetable garden, which the drought had killed. She and Ed had planted it with eager pride in the early Texas spring, thinking that it would furnish their living through most of the summer, and that they could sell enough extra vegetables from it to provide for their other necessities until autumn. Ed would have no money coming in till he had sold his cotton in the autumn, for 'he was a 'tenant farmer, working a few acres "on shares," planting only cotton and wholly dependent on the success of that single crop. The garden had flourished flamboyantly at first, she and Ed tending it with the enthusiasm of very young and newly married folk who adore their first garden, and with the anxiety of those who realize that much depends upon its growth. But the drought had come with its hot days and dewless nights, and now the gay,,green plants were shriveled and dead, the corn-stalks standing like skeletons that rattled in the wind, the withered bean vines trailing from their rude sticks in disarray, and all the carefully tended beds full of dead leaves and sifting, powdery dust. As the young wife sat by the window of her house, looking at the ruined garden and the cotton-field beyond it, she permitted herself for the first time to face her situation squarely. Until now she had hidden the facts behind her, trusting with the unreasoning optimism of youth to some illogical reversal of events that would make her life again the easy, pleasant thing it had always been until recently. But now she took her thoughts out as from some dark closet into the light of day and considered them. She needed money desperately, and none was available. In September there would be a baby, and she must make its tiny clothes. She had already delayed too long, but now at last something must be done. "What am I going to do?" she asked herself querulously. "I don't see any way out-unless-" She shrank from that "unless." She would n't face that yet; perhaps there would be some other way. The house, a mere shanty set on the edge of the cotton-field, warped by sun and rain, its paint washed away save for a few cracked flakes, its porch lurching forward, and its shed-kitchen dragging back like a slattern's skirt that is hitched up in front and trailing in the rear, was obviously a house that had given up hope. She could see Ed in the field, "shopping cotton," his body, clad in faded blue overalls, bent over the hoe as he patiently cut the weeds from the rows, a red bandana handkerchief about his neck, and his serious young face shaded by a Mexican straw hat, with broad brim and peaked crown. The sturdy young cotton plants, not yet hurt by the drought that had killed less hardy growths, lifted proud leaves to the light, as in defiance of inimical forces of nature, as if daring the drought to touch that field. Surely rain would come before the cotton crop was ruined, Bess Hickson told herself. The autumn would bring them money, but she could not wait till then. "It 's middle o' June now," she whispered. "I can't wait no longer. There ain't nothing I can do—unless-unless I wrote to ask pappy for money. I 'd ruther die than do that." Her mind fled from its dreary present to the past, so recent, yet so remote! Until a few months before Bessie had shaken a gay head with its crinkly redbrown hair as defiantly as a frisky colt at anything that did not please her, and had twinkled her amber-colored eyes at tiresome duties. Country neighbors had said her father spoiled her, but Jeff Holcomb had been wont to laugh gruffly and say, "Well, ef Bess an' I suit each other, nobody else has got any kick comin'." She had not heard from him or written to him since her elopement the autumn before. With a shiver she remembered his cold fury when she told him of her marriage. She had followed him out to the cow-pen to keep him company while he did the milking, as she often used to do, for they had been fast cronies, she and this hard man who had loved nobody in the world but his motherless daughter. "Pappy, Ed Hickson and I got married to-day," she had faltered as he straightened up to rest a moment from his task. When, in answer to his look of dazed astonishment, she repeated her frightened avowal, he had lunged to his feet, hurling over the pail of milk beside him. "Damnation! Then git your duds an' git out of my house-quick!" "But, Pappy," she had cried in alarm, "you'll like Ed when you know him better!" "Like him! He ain't got no more backbone than a twine string. I would n't give the scrapin's of my boot-heel for him-an' you 've married him!" His wrath seemed about to choke him. She had laid importunate hands on his arm, only to be shaken off. "But, listen, Pappy! He's just a boy, only twenty-one. He has n't had a chance yet." "I reckon he thinks he'll get his chance by settin' up here to be supported by me; but he 's missed his guess," was the grim rejoinder. "No, Pappy," she had interposed eagerly; "he 's rented a piece of land across the Brazos, about forty miles off, an' he's goin' to farm it. We'll live there." "A pore tenant farmer, scratchin' somebody else's land to raise a bale or two of cotton! An' to think you 've throwed yourself away on this nothin', you fool, when I 'd 'a' done anything in the world for you!" She had shrunk in terror from this thick-voiced, furious man, this stranger to her. "But, Pappy, I would n't 'a' thought you 'd treat me like this!" Her voice had broken on a sob. His clenched fists and rigid veins accused her. "Go, I tell you, damn you! I don't want ever to see you or hear from you again. An' don't come crawlin' to me when he starves you, as he 'll sure do." She had whirled from him, sobbing "I won't!" with something of his own fierce pride in her voice. Until now she had kept her word about seeing him or writing to him. She had meant to write, of course, for she loved him. She had meant to send him a loving letter, not to ask any favor, but to tell when she could that he had been mistaken, that Ed was doing well, and that she was happy. She had waited till she might be able to tell him that. All through the winter she had waited in the rickety house through which the searching "northers" crept. She had thought of the comfortable livingroom at home, with its roaring open fire, of her own chamber, furnished girlishly, as she and Ed had huddled over the stove in their front room, or eaten their meager meals from the table in the shed-kitchen. Those two rooms were all they had. She had thought to write in the spring, as soon as Ed had got his crop started promisingly, so that she could speak with optimism; but since the drought had ruined their vegetable garden and was threatening to damage their cotton, the prospect was not one to boast of. She could scarcely bear to think of going on forever like this, in a tenant farmer's struggle between the elements and debt. To farm land "on shares" meant mortgaging all one's hopes of a crop in the stores to pay for supplies through the year, so that if the cotton |