Mrs. Wilson being thus perswaded over into the difficulties of an American desart, her kinsman Old Mr. Dod, for her consolation under those difficulties did send her a present with an advice which had in it something of curiosity. He sent her a _brass_ counter, a _silver_ crown, and a _gold_ jacobus, all severally wrapped up; with this instruction unto the gentleman who carried it; that he should first of all deliver only the counter, and if she received it with any shew of discontent, he should then take no notice of her; but if she gratefully resented that small thing for the sake of the hand it came from, he should then go on to deliver the silver and so the gold, but withal assure her that such would be the dispensations to her and the good people of New England. If they would be content and thankful with such little things as God at first bestowed upon them, they should, in time, have silver and gold enough. Mrs. Wilson accordingly by her cheerful entertainment of the least remembrance from good old Mr. Dod, gave the gentleman occasion to go through with his whole present and the annexed advice. We could not feel surprised if poor homesick, heartsick, terrified Mrs. Wilson had “gratefully resented” Mr. Dod’s apparently mean gift to her on the eve of exile in our modern sense of resentment; but the meaning of resent in those days was to perceive with a lively sense of pleasure. I do not know whether this old Mr. Dod was the poet whose book entitled _A Posie from Old Mr. Dod’s Garden_ was one of the first rare books of poetry printed in New England in colonial days. We truly cannot from our point of view “marvayle” that these consorts did not long to come to the strange, sad, foreign shore, but wonder that they were any of them ever willing to come; for to the loneliness of an unknown world was added the dread horror of encounter with a new and almost mysterious race, the blood-thirsty Indians, and if the poor dames turned from the woods to the shore, they were menaced by “murthering pyrates.” Gurdon Saltonstall, in a letter to John Winthrop of Connecticut, as late as 1690, tells in a few spirited and racy sentences of the life the women lead in an unprotected coast town. It was sad and terrifying in reality, but there is a certain quaintness of expression and metaphor in the narrative, and a sly and demure thrusting at Mr. James, that give it an element of humor. It was written of the approach of a foe “whose entrance was as formidable and swaggering as their exit was sneaking and shamefull.” Saltonstall says:--