"You have a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs?" Dr. Antony asked of my Father, after he had been speaking of these lamentable things. "What good Protestant English household is without one?" exclaimed Aunt Dorothy; "least of all such as this, whose forefathers are enrolled in its lists." "Take good care of it, then," Dr. Antony replied, "for the Primate hath forbidden another copy to be printed, under the penalties the Star-Chamber will not fail to enforce." "The times are dark," he continued, "dark and silent. I stood this spring by the grave of Sir John Eliot, in the Church of the Tower; as brave, and loyal, and devout a gentleman as this nation ever knew, killed by inches in prison for calmly pleading the ancient rights of England in his place in Parliament, and then his body refused to his family for honourable burial among his kindred in his parish church in Cornwall, and cast like a felon's into a dishonoured grave in the precincts of the prison where he died. And I thought how it might have thrown a deeper shadow over his deathbed if he could have foreseen how, during these six years, the tyranny would be tightened, and the voice of the nation never once be heard in her lawful Parliaments." "The voice of the nation is audible enough to those who have ears to hear," said my Father. "Yea, verily," said Dr. Antony, "if you had journeyed through the country as I have, you would say so. When will kings learn that moans and subdued groans between set teeth are more dangerous from human lips than any torrents of passionate speech?" "And," added my Father, "that there is a silence even more significant and perilous than these!" "But there are two points of hope," said Dr. Antony. "One is the Puritan colony in New England, where our brethren have exchanged the vain struggle with human blindness and tyranny for the triumphant struggle with nature in her primeval forests and untrodden wilds. Four thousand good English men and women, and seventy-seven clergymen, have taken refuge there during these last twenty years. Not poor men only, for they have taken many thousand pounds of English money, or money's worth, with them, forsaking country and comfortable homes for the dear liberty to obey God rather than man. And these plantations, after the severest struggles and privations, are beginning to grow. "What they hope and mean to be is shown by this, that two years since, while food was still hard to win from the wilderness, and roads and bridges had yet to be made, the plantation of Massachusetts voted £400 for the founding of a college. Such an act might seem more like the foresight of the fathers of a nation than the care of a little exiled band struggling for existence with the Indians, the wilderness, and a hostile Court at home.