We now reach the fourth permanent colony on American soil; that which was more powerful in shaping our destinies and determining our national traits than any other. The story of the Pilgrims and Puritans is almost too familiar to be rehearsed. Every schoolboy knows of their adventures and trials, their hardships and their dauntless energy, their piety and rigidity of rule, the great qualities by the exercise of which it may be justly claimed that they made themselves the true founders of the American Republic. Driven by persecution from their native England, they took refuge in Holland; and from thence they sailed in two small vessels, the _Speedwell_ and the _Mayflower_ on a July day in 1620, for the new world. One hundred Puritans thus crossed the ocean. [Sidenote: Settlement at Plymouth.] After a tempestuous voyage of sixty-three days, the _Mayflower_ coasted along Cape Cod, and landed, on the twenty-first day of December, at Plymouth. The _Speedwell_ had been forced to put back in a disabled condition. Before landing, the Puritans made a solemn compact of government, purely republican in form, and to this they afterwards religiously adhered. In 1629 another English Puritan colony, called the "Massachusetts Bay Colony," settled at Salem; and in the following year came Governor John Winthrop, with eight hundred emigrants. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, thus re-enforced, and now numbering not far from one thousand souls, settled Boston and its neighborhood. [Sidenote: New England Colonized.] New Hampshire began to be settled three years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Maine was colonized not much later. Vermont, having been explored by Champlain in 1609, was settled some years after. The Rhode Island colony was founded by Roger Williams and five companions, driven from the Boston and Plymouth colonies in succession, in 1636; and Connecticut first became the seat of a settlement in 1635, the colonial constitution being adopted in 1630. Next in point of time, Delaware was settled by parties of Swedes and Finlanders in 1638, and was called "New Sweden." The province passed into the hands of the Dutch of New Amsterdam, however, in 1655. [Sidenote: European possessions in America.]