The day and scene were recalled forcibly to my memory by a visit paid to my Newark home in 1864 by Francis Pierce, the protestant’s oldest son, on his way home from Washington. He was one of a committee of Dorchester citizens sent to the Capital to look after the welfare of Massachusetts troops called into the field by a Republican President. The wife of the head of the Pierce homestead was one of the loveliest women ever brought into a world where saints are out of place. Near her lived an old widow, who was a proverb for captiousness and wrongheadedness. I never heard her say a kind or charitable word of neighbor or friend, until she astounded me one day by breaking out into a eulogy upon Aunt Pierce and Cousin Melissa, Francis’s wife: “We read in the Scriptures that God is love. I allers think of them two women when I hear that text. It might be said of both of ’em: they are jest _love_—through an’ through!” I carried the story to the blesséd pair, you may be sure. Whereupon, my aunt smiled compassionately. “Poor old lady! People who don’t know how much trouble she has had, are hard upon her. We can’t judge one another unless we know all sides of a question. She is greatly to be pitied.” And Cousin Melissa, in the gentle tone she might have learned from her beloved mother-in-law—“I always think that nobody is cross unless she is unhappy.” _Aurora Leigh_ had not been written then. If it had been, neither of the white-souled dears would have read a word of it. Yet Mrs. Browning put this into the mouth of her heroine: “The dear Christ comfort you! You must have been most miserable To be so cruel!” The old house was a never-ending delight to me. It was built in 1640 (see Chapter I), ten years after the good ship _Mary and John_ brought over from Plymouth the Massachusetts Bay Colony, landing her passengers in Boston. Robert Pierce (or Percie) was, although a blood connection of the Northumberland Percies, the younger son of a younger son, and so far “out of the running” for title or fortune on that account, that he sought a home and livelihood in the New World. My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart “Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe age of one hundred and four. From her the long line of descendants may have inherited the stout constitutions and stouter hearts that gave and kept for them a place in every community in which they have taken root. The story of the Pierce Homestead is told in _Some Colonial Homesteads_ more at length than I can give it here.