At the wooden wharf where the Pilgrims disembarked in Charlestown, they were met by Governor Winthrop, Dudley his Deputy and successor, and the Reverend Master Wilson, who, as he cordially grasped Elder Brewster by the hand, cast a hurried glance over the group of visitors, and felt a sensible relief at not perceiving the face of Ralph Smith among them. For this reverend gentleman, persecuted out of Salem for opinion’s sake, and refused shelter in Boston or Charlestown, had found an asylum among the liberal Pilgrims who presently invited him to the position of their first ordained minister. Mr. Wilson need not, however, have been alarmed, since Bradford, whose character singularly united the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, had not thought best to include a person so likely to be unwelcome to his hosts in this visit, at once friendly and official; for the Governor of Plymouth had been invited to assist at the first formal session of the Bay authorities, convened at the Great House built by Thomas Grove, the architect “entertained” by the Massachusetts Company under whose auspices the new colony came out. To this inauguration feast came also Governor Endicott from Salem, with Master Isaac Johnson, whose wife, the Lady Arbella, lay sick unto death in her new home, and never more would don the brave attire in which Alice Bradford had expressed such womanly interest. With these were assembled Sir Richard Saltonstall, Master Bradstreet, soon to be Governor of the Bay Colony, and Pynchon, ancestor, perhaps, of Hawthorne’s Hester; all the magistrates in fact of New England, all the representatives of legal or spiritual authority upon this side of the broad seas; for these men were about to test their right to self-government, and to exercise jurisdiction over the liberty, the property, the persons, nay, the very lives of others, and doubtless felt that in case this right were to be called in question from the throne or the Star Chamber, it might be well to secure the strength of numbers and authoritative consensus. But we, like Bradford and his company, are only guests at Mishawum, as they still called Charlestown, and must hasten back to Plymouth. Enough to briefly note that Morton of Merry Mount, who had audaciously returned to his “old nest” and his old ways, after Allerton had been forced to dismiss him from his house in Plymouth, was brought before the magistrates, somewhat unfairly tried, and sentenced to be “set in the bilboes,” and afterward sent prisoner to England. His entire property was to be confiscated, and his house burned in presence of the Indians whom he had robbed and insulted, and so speedily was the first portion of the sentence carried out that, as the court left the Great House at noon, they passed close beside the criminal already seated in the stocks with a party of Indian squaws staring at him, half in dismay, half in satisfaction.