[Illustration: Relics of Miles Standish.] Three hundred years ago the house of Standish was a notable one in England. The family had numerous possessions; their Lancashire estate of Duxbury Hall, in the shadow of Rivington Pike and the Pennine Hills, was pleasant and extensive, and there they had lived for generations, as there they live to-day. Of this Lancashire home was that John Standish, "squire to the king," who killed Wat Tyler, the agitator, on that memorable June day of 1381 when the boy-king of England, Richard the Second, so pluckily faced his rebellious subjects on the plain of Smithfield; of it was that Sir John Standish who fought under the leopard-banner of King Edward at the stone mill of Crecy; and of it was that gallant soldier Miles Standish, the Puritan captain, the first commissioned military officer of New England, famous in American history, song, and story, as the stay and bulwark of the Pilgrims of Plymouth in their days of struggle and beginning. Miles Standish (or Myles, as the old spelling has it) was born in Lancashire, presumably in the family manor house of Duxbury Hall, in the year 1584. The story of his life is simple. The absolute facts upon which it is based are meagre, but enough is known to warrant the assertion that Miles Standish was heir to the name and estates of the Standishes of Lancashire, from which, by some device not on record, he was, as he sturdily maintained in his will, "surreptitiously" defrauded. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the provinces of the Netherlands were battling for life against the tyranny of Spain. The Protestant Elizabeth of England gave help and support to the Protestant Stadtholder Maurice, and many of her fighting men carried pike or arquebus at the sack of Cadiz, fought at Nieuport and Ostend, or served the guns in the great sea-fight off Gibraltar that, in 1607, broke the power of Spain. Among these fighting-men was young Miles Standish, and he fought so stoutly and to such good purpose that, before he was twenty-one he had attained the rank and title of captain, and was known to Englishmen in the Low Countries as a brave and gallant soldier. In 1609 came the twelve years' truce between tired Spain and not less wearied Holland, that gave way in 1621 to the stubborn and bloody Thirty Years' War. It was, probably, in the early years of this truce that Captain Miles Standish, a born fighter, went back to England to battle for his heritage. Not being the match for the law men in England that he was for Spanish dons in Holland, he was forced to retire from the unequal contest, defeated but not conquered. This belief in his rights to the inheritance of the Standishes he sturdily maintained to the last; for, dying forty years after in the new land his sword had helped to conquer and his wisdom to found, he left by his last will and testament unto his son and heir, Alexander: "Ormistic, Bonsconge, Wrightington, Maudeslay, and the estates in the