The object of the present narrative is to give to the reader an account of the Mayflower Pilgrims that is concise and yet sufficiently comprehensive to embrace all essentials respecting the personality and pilgrimage of the Forefathers, whom the poet Whittier pictures to us in vivid verse as: those brave men who brought To the ice and iron of our winter time A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought With one mailed hand and with the other fought. In the pages which follow, the Old World homes and haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers are depicted and described. The story has the advantage of having been written on the scene of their early trials, concerted plans of escape, and stormy emigration, by one who, from long association, is familiar with the history and traditions of Boston and the quaint old sister port of Gainsborough, and perhaps imparts to the work some feeling of the life and local atmosphere of those places in the days that are dealt with, and before. The Pilgrims are followed into Holland and on their momentous journey across seas to the West. The story aims at being trustworthy and up-to-date as regards the later known facts of Pilgrim history and the developments which reflect it in our own time. It does what no other book on the subject has attempted: it traces the individual lives and varying fortunes of the Pilgrims after their settlement in the New World; and it states the steps taken in recent years to perpetuate the memory of the heroic band. The tale that is told is one of abiding interest to the Anglo-Saxon race; and its attractiveness in these pages is enhanced by the series of illustrations which accompanies the printed record. Grateful acknowledgment is made of much kindly assistance rendered during the preparation of the work, especially by the Honourable William S. Kyle, Treasurer of the First (Pilgrim) Church at Plymouth, Massachusetts. _Men they were who could not bend; Blest Pilgrims, surely, as they took for guide A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified._ * * * * * _From Rite and Ordinance abused they fled To Wilds where both were utterly unknown._ --WORDSWORTH, "_Ecclesiastical Sonnets," Part III. Aspects of Christianity in America, I. The Pilgrim Fathers._ _In romance of circumstance and the charm of personal heroism the story of the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent._ --J. A. DOYLE'S "_English in America_." _The coming hither of the Pilgrim three centuries ago ... shaped the destinies of this Continent, and therefore profoundly affected the destiny of the whole world._