Madeleine had paled very slightly while Winthrop spoke. Then she drew her small dignified self upright, and said very confidently: "I knew that we should arrive in time." "Methinks we shall scarcely find any swifter messenger to bear the good news to the young man----" commenced the quiet voice of Roger Williams, who had joined his friend and governor upon the quay. The end of the pastor's sentence became drowned in a shout of hearty laughter such as had never been heard before in Boston; for immediately he began to speak Madeleine picked up her skirt, and was already running like Atalanta, breathlessly demanding from those who stood by whether her feet were carrying her in the right way. "Send a cheer after her, men of Somerset," shouted Silas Upcliff. "For, by my soul, a braver lass ne'er loved an Englishman!" CHAPTER XXXVII. THE PLOWSHARE. It was summer in the year 1647, and over all the colony of Virginia there was peace. Fortunate were its settlers to be cut apart from their brethren in the isle of strife, where the deceitful king was imprisoned in his palace of Hampton Court, and the London citizens filled their streets with cries of "Parliament" and "Privilege." New England remained untouched by this wave of feeling, of which indeed it knew nothing, and its people went on planting their crops and gathering the increase, happy to be removed from the oppression of a king and the persecution of the Church. Upon the south side of the Potomac, at no great distance from the sea, stood a two-storey house overhung with wild vines, and approached by a ladder-like flight of steps which rose between two borders of flowers. Behind a plantation stretched in a straight mile, fringed on either side by sweet-smelling bush, where purple butterflies played through the long day and a silver stream laughed on its way to the sea. The Grove, as this homestead was named, had quickly identified itself among the successful colonial ventures. The day of small things was rapidly nearing its close. Not only were the joint owners of the plantation able to supply the neighbouring village with wheatmeal and cheeses, but their export business to the Old World was growing more profitable each season. The Virginian exporters, Viner and Woodfield, were well-known to import merchants of Bristol, and faded invoices of that firm were to be seen in more than one dusty counting-house a century later, when change and chance demanded a winding-up of the business of certain old-time traders across the seas.