One does not like to mar the romance by accepting the story of her marriage to one of Powhatan's captains. So dear is the romance of the Indian girl's devotion to John Smith, that we are tempted to be unjust to John Rolfe and to explain her marriage at Jamestown as the consequence of her longing to belong to the people of her hero,--to be "forever and ever his countrywoman,"--and to find in the Puritanic John Rolfe, with his tiresome throes of conscience and long-drawn apologies for loving her, a counterpart of her gallant captain. When she met John Smith in London, very pitiful must she have appeared to him, as her portrait does to us, in her stiff brocade, high, starched ruff, and English hat; she, the swaying, graceful windflower of the forest! She must have appeared to him strangely unlike her charming self. Her dark locks, shaven closely on her temples, as was the custom of her people while she was a maid, had been suffered to grow since she had become a matron, and hung rebelliously about her pearl ear-rings; her lithe wrists, primly sustaining her fan of three feathers, were fettered by broad English cuffs. Those feathers were the only familiar connecting links between her past and her present! All else was strange. We read that she neither smiled nor spoke for two hours when she was visited by Captain Smith. Presently she said, "They did tell me you were dead, and I knew no other until I came to Plymouth," and then in response to his deferential devoirs to "the Lady Rebekah," indignantly declares that she will have none of such talk! She means always to call him "Father," and be to him a "child," as she had been in Virginia. And so the legend begins; and when she finds "her grave," as the quaint old writer says, "at Gravesend," she could not rest "in ye chauncell of ye church," but John Rolfe having married another wife, and Captain Smith having died, she was free to return to her old haunts, to meet her hero without let or reproof, and explain all that had been so wrong and so unfortunate. The belated fishermen, returning to their homes on the Ware, grew accustomed to seeing a thin thread of smoke issuing from the Old Stone House, and flitting past the loopholes might sometimes be discerned the dusky form of Pocahontas, with the white plume, the badge of royalty, in her dark hair. Here she awaited as of yore the coming of Captain Smith, and here he came and held converse with her. At last the troubled soul is comforted--the "deare and darling daughter" of Powhatan fades away from the legends of the old Virginians and is seen no more. Let us hope she is happy in a state where there are no separations and no mysteries, and that if she ever revisits the pale glimpses of the moon her errand may be one of beneficence to her many descendants.