It is greatly to the credit of Captain Miles Standish, the puritan soldier, that his life-long friend was William Brewster, the puritan divine. Their farms in Duxbury were side by side. The scene upon which this noble Christian man looked, in the evening of his eventful life, must have been one full of peaceful beauty, as he stood, staff in hand, upon the threshold of his lowly, yet comfortable cottage. His peaceful home was situated about three miles across the bay from the village of Plymouth. By land it was a roundabout route of nearly eight miles. His farm was on a picturesque peninsula shooting out southerly into the placid waters of Plymouth Bay. In his life of fourscore years and four, he had witnessed the long reigns of three of the most remarkable of the English sovereigns. The days of his early manhood were passed through scenes of persecution and suffering, whose vicissitudes were painful and agitating in the extreme. His mental energies had been strengthened by the discipline of adversity and severe afflictions. As an exile, he had encountered poverty and had been exposed to the most severe deprivations and toils. He had landed, with a feeble band, in this New World when it was but a howling wilderness, and where the utmost courage and prudence were requisite, to save the little colony from utter extinction by a savage foe. He had lived to see the colony securely established, to see the Indians to a very great degree conciliated, and not a few of them brought under the influence of Christian example and instruction. From one little settlement, of seven log huts, he had seen others springing up all around, till eight flourishing towns were established, with eight churches, under eight pastors. He had seen the colony reduced to but fifty souls, men, women and children. And, ere he died, the census reported a population of eight thousand, with a well-defined government, a free constitution and established laws. Infant colonies were rising in various points to a vigorous manhood, and were uniting in a confederacy, already sufficiently powerful to repel all native foes, and which gave promise of being able, ere long, to maintain independence against the machinations of all foreign enemies.