Chapter 1 - Page 2

advancement and adventure in the more southern provinces, where slaves
offered impunity from labor, and where war, with a bolder and more
stirring policy, oftener gave rise to scenes of excitement, and, of
course, to the exercise of the faculties best suited to their habits and
dispositions. The more grave, and the religiously-disposed, found refuge
in the colonies of New-England. Thither a multitude of private gentlemen
transferred their fortunes and their families, imparting a character of
intelligence and a moral elevation to the country, which it has nobly
sustained to the present hour.

The nature of the civil wars in England had enlisted many men of deep and
sincere piety in the profession of arms. Some of them had retired to the
colonies before the troubles of the mother country reached their crisis,
and others continued to arrive, throughout the whole period of their
existence, until the restoration; when crowds of those who had been
disaffected to the house of Stuart sought the security of these distant
possessions.

A stern, fanatical soldier, of the name of Heathcote, had been among the
first of his class, to throw aside the sword for the implements of
industry peculiar to the advancement of a newly-established country. How
far the influence of a young wife may have affected his decision it is not
germane to our present object to consider, though the records, from which
the matter we are about to relate is gleaned, give reason to suspect that
he thought his domestic harmony would not be less secure in the wilds of
the new world, than among the companions with whom his earlier
associations would naturally have brought him in communion.

Like himself, his consort was born of one of those families, which, taking
their rise in the franklins of the times of the Edwards and Henrys, had
become possessors of hereditary landed estates, that, by their
gradually-increasing value, had elevated them to the station of small
country gentlemen. In most other nations of Europe, they would have been
rated in the class of the _petite noblesse_. But the domestic happiness of
Capt. Heathcote was doomed to receive a fatal blow, from a quarter where
circumstances had given him but little reason to apprehend danger. The
very day he landed in the long-wished-for asylum, his wife made him the
father of a noble boy, a gift that she bestowed at the melancholy price of
her own existence. Twenty years the senior of the woman who had followed
his fortunes to these distant regions, the retired warrior had always
considered it to be perfectly and absolutely within the order of things,
that he himself was to be the first to pay the debt of nature. While the
visions which Captain Heathcote entertained of a future world were