Winthrop relates that once “at Watertown there was, in the view of divers witnesses, a great combat betwixt a mouse and a snake; and, after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: the mouse was a poor contemptible people, brought by God hither, who should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom. Upon the same occasion he added: ‘I dreamed before coming to this country, that I was here and saw a church rise out of the earth, which gradually expanded into a colossal shape’—as pray God ours may.”[750] Winthrop’s prayer seemed even then in the way to exact fulfilment. Many earnest, devoted Pilgrims, continued to pour into New England. In 1631, Eliot, the famous apostle to the Indians, landed at Salem.[751] Full of love and full of hope, he soon entered upon those labors which have immortalized his name on earth, and enrolled it on the heavenly records as a teacher and benefactor of his race.[752] A little earlier, Roger Williams was wafted to these shores, where, in his May of youth, he found a glorious destiny awaited him.[753] The Pilgrims made the best of every thing—saw only the good of the land. Even the climate of New England did not lack encomiasts. Wood had been “carefully hatched,” yet in England disease sapped his life. While in America, he wrote: “Scarce do I know what belongs to a day’s sickness.”[754] An English churchman, who had not Wood’s motive for liking New England, saw with different eyes: “The transitions from heat to cold are short, sudden, and paralyzing. We are sometimes frying, and at others freezing; and as some men die at their labor in the field of heat, so some in winter are frozen to death by the cold.”[755] No doubt. “Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking of the frosty Caucasus?” The Puritans saw New England as the refuge of the godly, and looking at it through the mirage of sentiment, its sky rivalled that of Italy in soft beauty. To the churchman it seemed a rugged wilderness in very deed. It was a difference of standpoint. But mild or severe, the Pilgrims loved this adopted mother on whose breast they lay, and their settlements began to increase in number. A brood of eight little towns, or _townlets_, now nestled under the wings of the Massachusetts charter;[756] while Plymouth already began to think of equipping a new colony,[757] and annexing the Connecticut. The western wilds were no longer tenantless, or what is equivalent to that, held only by prowling barbarians. The French, who had been hovering over the coast ever since their rout from L’Acadie, in 1613, by Sir Samuel Argall, had recently acquired Canada by purchase.[758] The wise statesmanship of Richelieu had bought from Charles I.—busy in a fatal attempt to enforce ceremonialism, “Rending the book in struggles for the binding,”—