9. No holiday-task lay before the settlers. Huts had to be built in the intervals of rain and snow. Meanwhile the _Mayflower_ was their home, but so ill provided were they for enduring the rigours of winter that by cold or famine half the company were cut off before the spring. In April, the vessel which had sheltered them so long sailed away for England, leaving the survivors ready to bear their hard lot with a stout heart. Thrifty and industrious as they were, their progress was very slow; and at the end of ten years they numbered only three hundred souls. They had, however, struck deep root and remained steadfast. "Let it not be grievous unto you," some of their brethren in England had written to them in the midst of their sufferings, "that yours has been the task to break the ice for others. The honour shall be yours to the world's end." 10. At last the time came for a large increase of their numbers from home. In 1630 seven hundred emigrants set sail for the land of freedom in the West; for Charles I. was now on the throne and had begun his arbitrary rule. Before the assembling of the Long Parliament (1640), which carried on the struggle that ended with the execution of the king, no less than two hundred emigrant ships, carrying twenty thousand Englishmen, had crossed the Atlantic. Nor were these men the waifs and strays, the mere wreckage of society, but men of means and character, ready to risk all for the privilege of serving God according to their conscience. As the ships bore them away out of sight of their native land, they remembered it, not with feelings of bitterness for the ill treatment they had received on account of their religion, but as the home of their fathers. As its shores faded from their sight there arose from every heart the tender cry, "_Farewell, dear England!_" (4) PROGRESS IN COLONIZING. 1. We have now sketched out the circumstances attending the planting of our first two colonies--Virginia and New England. Between these two colonies was planted another, called Maryland, in honour of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. 2. _Maryland_ was in most respects a highly-favoured colony. It was founded, in 1633, by Lord Baltimore, who seems to have risen above most men of his age in his readiness to tolerate men of a different faith from his own. Baltimore declared himself a Catholic, and was desirous of providing a home in America for men of his creed, since they were debarred from the free exercise of their religion in England. Neither Virginia nor New England would have suited his purpose; none but members of the Church of England were welcomed in the former, and none but Puritans of the strictest order were tolerated in the latter.