“On the 6th of September, 1620, in the Mayoralty of Thomas Fownes, after being “kindly entertained and courteously used by divers Friends there dwelling,” the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Plymouth in the MAYFLOWER in the Providence of God to settle in NEW PLYMOUTH, and to lay the Foundation of the NEW ENGLAND STATES. The ancient Cawsey whence they embarked was destroyed not many years afterwards, but the Site of their Embarkation is marked by the Stone bearing the name of the MAYFLOWER in the pavement of the adjacent Pier. This Tablet was erected in the Mayoralty of J. T. Bond, 1891, to commemorate their Departure, and the visit to Plymouth in July of that Year of a number of their Descendants and Representatives.” There were forty-eight men and fifty-three women and children in this little band, and the voyage occupied sixty days. The spot means much to Americans, for here the handful of emigrants for conscience’ sake definitely cast adrift from their native land, which denied them religious liberty, and made oversea to the coast of Massachusetts, there to found a nation anew. The little _Mayflower_ had sailed originally from Boston, in Lincolnshire, and bade farewell to old England from the coast of Devon; and thus it seemed fitting to those stern voluntary outcasts that they should—still fondly looking back to their motherland—name their landing-place in the new world “Plymouth Rock,” and the earliest among their settlements “Boston.” There was, therefore, an exquisite fitness in the circumstance that it was into this Boston harbour in America, a hundred and fifty-three years later, that the colonists should fling the taxed tea, and thus begin the struggle whence the dependent New England colonies emerged as the sovereign United States. Our sympathies go out, historically, toward those Pilgrim Fathers, but they would seem, viewed closely, to have been not quite so lovable as historic glamour makes them. Their religious fervency was undoubted, but by all accounts it made them ill to live with, and they would have been greatly improved by a little sense of humour. But then—it is a startling thought—if humour had entered at all into their composition they had never left their native shores at all, and the stern principles which led them to refuse to acknowledge James I. as head of the Church, and to expatriate themselves when that shambling travesty of a king declared that if they did not conform, the country should not hold both, would have melted into satiric laughter and an easygoing compliance. But two autocrats may not reign side by side; as easily might a soliloquy be conducted by two or more persons; and a king with a fondness for omniscience and absolutism, and a people whose religious fervency had risen almost to the white heat of fanaticism cannot abide together; hence the voyage of the _Mayflower_, and this place of pilgrimage for descendants of those New Englanders.