in the first years of their Plymouth Plantation, who does not know the story! Of the courage, the constancy and the prudence with which they overcame their difficulties, who has not admired the spectacle! For eight years they remained the only successful colony in New England. Then came the memorable movement of Puritans out of Old England into New England, beginning with the little settlement at Salem, under John Endicott; expanding next year into the "Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay"; founding Dorchester, Roxbury, Charlestown, Watertown, and Boston, in 1630, and rapidly possessing and putting the stamp of the stern, strong Puritan character on the whole section of America which it planted with towns. In the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay a cleavage soon occurred, on lines between democratic and aristocratic or theocratic opinion, and democratic seceders pushed southwestwards into the Connecticut Valley, where Dutch and English were disputing possession of the country. There they settled the question decisively, in 1635 and 1636, by founding the towns of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield and Springfield. Three years later the three towns first named confederated themselves in a little republic, with a frame of government which is the first known written constitution, and so gave birth to the future State of Connecticut. In 1638 New Haven was founded by a company of wealthy nonconformists from England, under the lead of their minister, John Davenport, and was a distinct colony until 1662, when it was annexed to Connecticut by a royal charter. Another State, the smallest of the New England commonwealths, was taking form at this same time, in a little wedge of territory on Narragansett Bay, between Connecticut and Massachusetts. Roger Williams, the great apostle of a tolerant Christianity, driven from Salem by the intolerant Puritanism of the Bay, went forth with a few followers into the wilderness, bought land from the Narragansett Indians, and laid the foundations (1636) of the town of Providence. In that same year another small company of people, banished from Boston for receiving the teachings of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, bought the island of Aquidneck or Aquetnet from the Indians and settled at its northern end. This community was soon divided, and part of it removed to the southern end of the island, beginning a settlement which grew to be the town of Newport. The island as a whole received the name of the Isle of Rhodes, or Rhode Island; and in 1644 its two settlements were united with Providence, under a charter procured in England by Roger Williams, forming the colony of Providence Plantations. In 1643 the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, entered into a confederation, from which Rhode Island was excluded, calling