Walking under the elm-trees of the highroad, and through the yellow gorse, across green meadows and by the banks of the placid Idle, he stopped perhaps to admire the mulberry-tree planted there by the world-weary Cardinal Wolsey. That arch-enemy of the Reformation little thought that a branch of this tree would one day cross the Atlantic, to be preserved with Pilgrim relics by friends of that “new, pernicious sect of Lutherans,” against which he warned the king! Near Bradford’s birthplace in Austerfield now stands, completely restored, the twelfth-century parish church where he was baptized in 1590, and from which he “seceded” when about seventeen years old. Did the quaint old bell-cote with the two small bells, the beautiful Norman arch of the southern doorway with its rich zigzag ornament and beak-headed moulding, the wicked-looking dragon on the tympanum, with the tongue of flame--did this perfect picture of Old-World beauty flash across his memory when, some thirty years later, he helped build the rude fort on our Burial Hill, which served as the first “Meeting-House” in New England? We like to believe that Bradford belonged to the honest yeoman class, that he “was used to a plaine country life & the innocente trade of husbandrey”; we know that he had a natural love of study which led him, despite the many difficulties he met, to master the Dutch tongue as well as French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which latter tongue he studied the more, “that he might see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all their native beauty.” [Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank. THE OLD FORT AND FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, ON BURIAL HILL, 1621.] Associated as teacher here with the venerable Richard Clyfton, “the minister with the long white beard,” and succeeding him as pastor, we have found the eloquent John Robinson, that winner of all men’s hearts, that helper of all men’s souls. A youthful student at Cambridge, living in an age and in an atmosphere of religious questioning, he was deeply troubled with scruples concerning conformity. He tells us “had not the truth been in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, I had never broken those bonds of flesh and blood wherein I was so straitly tied, but had suffered the light of God to have been put out in mine unthankful heart by other men’s darkness.” Happy in finding congenial spirits in the new community at Scrooby, Bradford tells us he soon became “every way as a commone father unto them.” “Yea, such was y^{e} mutuall love and reciprocall respecte that this worthy man had to his flocke and his flocke to him that it might be said of them as it once was of that famouse Emperour, Marcus Aurelious and y^{e} people of Rome, that it was hard to judge wheather he delighted more in haveing such a people, or they in haveing such a pastor. His love was greate towards them, and his care was all ways bente for their best good, both for soul & body.”