To commemorate this visit, and the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers two hundred and seventy years before, the site of the historic embarkation was marked by the Mayflower Stone and Tablet placed on the Barbican at Plymouth, the stone in the pavement of the pier adjacent to the ancient causey trod by the Pilgrims' departing feet and destroyed a few years later, and the tablet on the wall of the Barbican facing it. The memorial and the circumstances of its erection formed a fitting tribute to the New England pioneers; and the story told by these stones should serve to remind all who behold them of the devoted lives, the splendid achievement, and the romantic history of the Mayflower Pilgrims. They are at once a landmark and a shrine honoured by the English and American peoples. In June, 1896, another company of New World pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and proceeded to worship in spirit at Old World shrines. During two weeks they wandered about the dear old country--"Our Old Home," as Nathaniel Hawthorne calls it in his book of English reminiscences--lingering on the scenes associated with the lives of their forefathers: quiet villages wherein they were born; quaint, half-forgotten boroughs in which they lived; the metropolis in which they taught; the sombre East Anglia, where many of them died "for the testimony." But chief of all were the places where these sojourners could look on the homes of the grave, brave men who gathered together the people who sailed in the Mayflower, and led the way to the New World. [Illustration: _Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford_ SCROOBY VILLAGE] We still call them "the Pilgrim Fathers," in spite of what the Reverend Joseph Hunter, an esteemed native of South Yorkshire, wrote in his book.[12] "There is something of affectation in this term," he finds, "which is always displeasing to me." "It appears to me," says he, "to be philologically improper." And then he explains. "An American who visits the place from which the founders of his country emigrated is a pilgrim in the proper sense of the word, whether he finds an altar, a shrine, or a stone of memorial, or not. But these founders, when they found the shores of America, were proceeding to no object of this kind, and even leaving it to the winds and the waves to drive them to any point on an unknown and unmarked shore." Perhaps Mr. Hunter is right, philologically; but apart from his history (which may be challenged, because the master of the Mayflower knew where he was going if the Pilgrims did not, and a map and description of the region had been published by Captain John Smith, the name-giver of New England), the designation stands, and will ever be cherished by those familiar with the spots these faithful Fathers left when, pilgrims and wanderers, they set forth they scarcely knew whither, and finally crossed the little-known sea. And the most historic of such shrines are in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.