She married, then, the year Captain Smith sailed, and doubtless after she was told of his death. It is astonishing that so interesting a fact has not been mentioned by any one of the Virginia historians who have written since 1849--Charles Campbell, Esten Cooke, or Alexander Brown. Dr. Doyle, of England, however, relates it. It was not agreeable to the romantic Virginians that their Indian maiden should have been a widow when she married John Rolfe. The first news we had in America of Strachey's book came to us in a _Princeton Magazine_ in 1850. The writer frankly confesses, "Some of the accounts of Pocahontas are unexpected: _nor dare we copy them_!" The wheeling in the Jamestown market place was one of the "accounts." Can it be that Virginians would hold her less "a thing enskyed and saintly" if they knew her to have been a widow? This may be natural. Perhaps we would not enshrine the Maid of Orleans nor the Maid of Saragossa as we do, had one been the "widow Joan" and the other the "widow Augusta." Very capricious and unreasonable is poor human nature in matters of love and romance. Pocahontas is to be honoured all the more inasmuch as she conquered every instinct of her savage nature, becoming reverent, gentle, pitiful, and patient; and corrected every blemish in her "manners barbarous," learning to "live civilly," and behaving, in all situations, with discreet gravity. Like the lovely pond lily, the root was in slime and darkness; but at the first touch of the sun the golden heart was revealed of a perfect flower. Of one thing we may be sure: she was not won unwooed. The customs of her people forbade any such procedure. Her father may have sold her for a bushel or two of "rawrenoke," as he sold one of her sisters, but Kocoun must have followed the prescribed rule of his people. [73]"Yf a young mayden live under parents," says Strachey, "the parents must allow of the sutor; for their good-wills the wooer promiseth the daughter shall not want of such provisions, nor of deare-skynns fitly drest for to weare; besides he promiseth to doe his endeavor to procure beades, perle and copper; and for handsell gives her before them something as a token of betroathing or contract of a further amity. And he presents the young woman with the fruits of his labours, fowle or fish or berries--and so after, as the likeing growes; and as soone as he hath provided her a home (if he have none before) and some platters, morters and matts he takes her home;" not, however, before the simple marriage[74] ceremony. Her father calls together his kindred and friends, and in their presence joins the hands of the contracting parties. The bridegroom's father or chief friend, having provided a long string of beads, breaks it over the clasped hands, giving the beads afterward to the bride, and "soe with much mirth and feasting they goe together."