“Unjustly deprived of these vast estates, as he avers in his will, in which he bequeaths his title to his eldest son, it seems probable that he went to Holland near the time of his majority. Queen Elizabeth signed his commission as lieutenant in the English forces, serving in the Netherlands against the cruel armies of the Inquisition. As she died in 1603, about two years after his majority, it is not improbable that we are indebted to that first disappointment, which may have driven him, in his early manhood and some despair, into the army. “From 1600 to 1609, the year of the great truce between Prince Maurice and the King of Spain, the contest was peculiarly obstinate and bloody. In this fierce school the Puritan captain learned the temper and art of war. “From 1609 to 1620, a period of truce but not of civil tranquility, the Low Countries were inflamed by those theological disputes of the Calvinists and Arminians which brought the excellent Barneveldt to the scaffold, and drove the great Grotius--a fugitive from prison--into exile. In this school, perhaps, Myles Standish learned some uncompromising religious opinions, which brought him into strange sympathy and connection with the Pilgrim church in Leyden. Both periods seemed to leave their impress on his character. The inventory, recorded with his will, mentions the Commentaries of Cæsar, Bariffe’s Artillery, three old Bibles, and three muskets, with the harness of the time, complete. His Bibles were old. A well-worn Bible for every musket; and, thank God, a musket, not an old one, to defend each Bible! “The schedule of his books, some forty in number, records nearly twenty which are devotional or religious. With the memory of one act of singularly resolute daring, when, in obedience to the colonial orders to crush a great Indian conspiracy, he took a squad of eight picked men into the forests, and deemed it prudent to kill the most turbulent warrior with his own hands, we may imagine how the Pilgrim soldier, friend and associate of Brewster, disciple of the saintly Robinson, rose from the perusal of one of the old Bibles, or of “Ball on Faith,” “Spasles against Heresie,” or “Dodd on the Lord’s Supper,” to stab Pecksuot to the heart with his own knife; a giant who had taunted him with his small stature, in almost the very words of Goliah in his insulting sneer at David, long before; and to cut off the head of Watawamat, which bloody trophy the elders had ordered him to bring home with him. We can imagine him on the evening of that cheaply victorious day, taking more than usual pleasure in the exultant psalms of the warrior David, and in a chapter of Burrough’s “Christian Contentement” and “Gospell Conversation,” especially as he had his three muskets with bandoleers, and Bariffe’s Artillery, close at his hand. One can feel the unction with which the valorous Pilgrim would religiously fulfil the colonial order to smite the heathen hip and thigh, and hew Agag in pieces before the Lord.