At the little village of Scrooby, in the midland counties of England, a small body of separatists, under the ministry of William Brewster, were in the habit of meeting regularly for worship, and by their zeal and good works were winning to their own persuasion large numbers of the common people, when their elder and two of their chief members were summoned before the Ecclesiastical Commission of York for heresy, and condemned to pay a fine of £20 each. This was but the beginning of evils; fines were succeeded by imprisonment and indignities of every kind; and warned by previous experience――some of their co-religionists had fled to Holland a few years before――the Scrooby separatists resolved, like them, to seek a refuge in the Protestant Republic. To the number of 200, the Puritans, most of them well-to-do men, disposed as quietly as they could of their lands and houses, and agreeing to meet at Boston, in Lincolnshire, stealthily made their way from the homes they were willing to forsake rather than abjure their belief. A large number succeeded in embarking on board a vessel bound for Holland in Boston Harbor, but they were betrayed by the captain, who handed them over to some officers in quest of them. They were searched, robbed of all their valuables, and marched back to Boston. A month’s imprisonment was succeeded by a second attempt at escape, ending even more disastrously than the first. A Dutch ship was this time engaged to convey the sufferers for their faith to Holland, and it was arranged that the embarkation should take place at a lonely spot somewhere between Grimsby and Hull. The women and children were sent to the rendezvous in a small vessel; the men marched thither in small parties by land. All seemed likely to go well. The two detachments met on the low sands of the Lincoln shores, and eager greetings were exchanged between husbands and wives, fathers and little ones. The men were embarking on the Dutch vessel, on which their families were to join them immediately, when a loud tumult suddenly arose on the beach, and down rushed a mob of country people, wild with delight at having arrived in time to cut off the heretics.