469

Her little child, Thomas Rolfe, was left at Plimouth, with Sir Lewis Stukly, that desired the keeping of it."

She was but twenty-two years old.

Tray

elled and erudite Purchas writes of her last days:

"She did not only accustom herself to civilitie, but still carried herself as the daughter of a King, and was, according respected, not only by the Company which allowed provision for herself and son; but of divers particular persons of honor in their hopeful zeal for her to advance Christianity. I was present when able and reverend patron, the Lord Bishop of London, my honorDr. King, entertained her with festival, and state and pomp, beyond what I have seen in his great hospitalitie afforded to other ladies. At her return towards Virginia, she came to Gravesend to her end and grave."

Hon. William Wirt Henry, whose Life and Letters of Patrick Henry rank him among the most accomplished historiographers of our country, has paid a more eloquent tribute to Our Lady of the James:

Pocahontas, who, born the daughter of a savage king, was endowed with all the become a Christian princess; who was the first of her graces which people to embrace Christianity, and to unite in marriage with the English race; who, like a guardian angel,

watched over and preserved the infant colony which has developed into a great people, among whom her own descendants have ever been conspicuous for true nobility; and whose name will be honored while this great people occupy the land upon which she so signally aided in establishing them."

IN

XIX

JAMESTOWN AND WILLIAMSBURG

N the by-gone time in which the tide of Southern travel flowed up the Potomac River, the custom prevailed of tolling the bell as each steamer passed Mount Vernon. At the sound the passengers gathered upon the forward deck to gaze with bared heads upon the enclosure in which are the ashes of Washington. Sadder and not less reverent might be the toll with which river-craft should announce the approach to the ruined tower upon a low headland of the James.

Here on May 13, 1607, was set the first rootlet of English dominion in the vast Virginia plantation that was to outlive pestilence. and famine and savage violence. The bounds. of what an old writer calls a "mighty empire" are thus defined:

"On the east side is the ocean; on the south lieth Florida; on the north Nova Francia (Canada); "as for the west, the limits thereof are unknown."

De la Warr found upon the marshy peninsula, in 1610, a church twenty-four feet broad by sixty long. The site was the same as that tent" under occupied by "the old rotten

which the first Protestant service in America was held. During his administration the sanctuary was decorated on Sunday with flowers and evergreens, and opened for daily afternoon service during the week. There were a baptismal font, a tall pulpit, a chancel of red cedar, and in the tower two bells. These rang a joyous peal in the April of 1613, when John Rolfe and Pocahontas knelt in the aisle for a nuptial benediction.

The tower roofing the vestibule stands still. The mortar is as hard as stone, and the bricks are further bound together by ivy stems and roots. The arched doorway is that through which "the Lady Rebecca" and her pale-face bridegroom passed that day, arm Vandal hammer and pick have dug holes in the sides. The church, flanked by the tower, has crumbled to the foundations; in the

in arm.

Fennel

crowded graveyard behind it ruthless tourists have not left one stone upon another. brushes our shoulders, and brambles entangle our feet as we explore the waste grounds. A quarter-mile away is a government building erected by Sir William Berkeley, and afterward and for many years the homestead of the Jaquelins and Amblers.' The silent decrepitude of neglected old age broods over the landscape; the tawny river slowly and surely licks away the clayey banks.

The place is haunted. In the languorous calm of the spring-like weather we sit upon the broken wall in the shadow of the ivy-bound tower, the dead of six generations under our feet, and dream. Now and then we talk softly of what has been here, and of those who people our dream-world.

John Smith, the conqueror of kings, walked these shores and took counsel with brave, loyal George Percy. Hereabouts he welcomed Pocahontas and her train of forest maidens, and withstood to their teeth Wingfield and Ratcliffe and Archer. Here Sir Thomas Dale negotiated the marriage of Powhatan's daugh

Since this chapter was written the Ambler House has been destroyed by fire.