Not a word was exchanged between the leaders upon the events of the morning, but it was no news to any of them, when the long service was over and in the seclusion of home the women’s tongues were let loose, to hear that Lyford, in spite of his abject repudiation of his Episcopal ordination, and membership with the Separatist Church, had gathered a congregation, read the English Service, preached a vituperative sermon against the leaders of the colony, and administered the Communion. Such open bravado and schism as this could not be allowed to continue, for although the Pilgrims never persecuted any man for honest difference of religious belief, and were on very cordial terms with many members of the English Church, whom their pastor Robinson received to Communion and fellowship, it was hardly to be expected that they would permit a double apostate like Lyford to gather a body of malcontents in their midst, and hold services avowedly antagonistic to the church of the Pilgrims. Nobody, therefore, was surprised when, on the Monday following this Sunday, the governor’s message went forth summoning all the men of the colony, whether church-members, citizens, or only temporary residents, to assemble at the Fort at nine of the clock on Tuesday morning in a Court of the People, the colony not yet having outgrown this, the ideal mode of popular government. CHAPTER IV. THOU ART THE MAN! Again Bartholomew Allerton, with much pride in the performance, beat out the “assembly” in the Town Square, and at the sound some fourscore men gathered from the houses, the shore, or those impaled garden plots surrounding each house, where already patient toil had produced in the wilderness very sweet reminiscences of English cottage-gardens. The weather was wild, and ominous with the promise of one of those fierce storms of wind and rain, pretty sure to visit the coast in March and September, and still called by Plymouth folk the line storm, or the equinoctial, in calm contempt of modern meteorological theories. They also call a thunder-shower, however slight, a “tempest,” and who is to object? Not I. “Master Lyford’s friends are gathering in force,” remarked Standish, as he stood at the door of his house just below the Fort on Burying Hill. “His friends!” repeated Alden, who, living in the house between that of the governor and the captain, was often to be found in company of the latter. “I did not think he had friends enough in Plymouth to be called a force.” “Not in Plymouth, nor yet in heaven, but somewhere between the two. The armies of the Prince of the Power of the Air.”