If the setting of this picture would add to its interest, it is easy to portray the little settlement. The peninsula, but half as large as the Boston of to-day, was fringed with sea-marshes, and was crowned with three conical hills, surmounted respectively with the windmill, the fort, and the beacon. The champaign was simply an extended pasture with few trees, but fine springs of water. Winding footpaths--most interesting of roadways--connected the detached dwellings, and their irregular outlines still show in our Boston streets. The thatched clay houses were being replaced by better and more substantial dwellings. William Coddington had built the first brick house. On the main street, now Washington Street, just east of where the Old South Church now stands, lived the dame of highest degree, and perhaps the most beautiful personality, in this little group--Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, the “loving faythfull yoke-fellow” of Governor John Winthrop. She was his third wife, though he was but thirty when he married her. He had been first married when but seventeen years old. He writes that he was conceived by his parents to be at that age a man in stature and understanding. This wife brought to him, and left to him, “a large portion of outward estate,” and four little children. Of the second wife he writes, “For her carriage towards myselfe, it was so amiable and observant as I am not able to expresse; it had only this inconvenience, that it made me delight in hir too much to enjoy hir long,”--and she lived with him but a year and a day. He married Margaret in 1618, and when she had borne five children, he left her in 1630, and sailed to New England. She came also the following year, and was received “with great joy” and a day of Thanksgiving. For the remaining sixteen years of her life she had but brief separations from her husband, and she died, as he wrote, “especially beloved of all the country.” Her gentle love-letters to her husband, and the simple testimony of contemporary letters of her relatives and friends, show her to have been truly “a sweet gracious woman” who endured the hardships of her new home, the Governor’s loss of fortune, and his trying political experiences, with unvarying patience and “singular virtue, modesty and piety.”