Probably that period of bliss now dawned which makes most lovers feel themselves lifted into a region just above the earth and when they tread on air. It was in the hallowed time of this courtship, on the skirts of the deep pine forests, that they first happened on the mayflower, the epigea, full of the sweetest essence of the earth which lends it her name, and felt as if love and youth and joy and innocence had invented a flower for them alone,—the deeply rosy and ineffably fragrant mayflower that blooms only in the Plymouth woods in its pink perfection, and whose breath must have seemed like a breath blown out of the open doors of the new life awaiting them together. If they had ventured as far as any of the numberless ponds, set like jewels in the ring of the green woods about them, something later in their new year, they would have found the blushing sabbatia in all its pristine loveliness,—the flower most typical of Priscilla herself; the flower to which some fortunate fate, in view of the sabbatical character of the region, gave the name of an old Italian botanist, as if it were its own from the beginning; a flower which is to-day less rare around Plymouth than elsewhere. Now, in the soft spring evenings, too, it may be that they strolled along the beach, and watched the phosphorescence of the waters playing about the sacred rock with which the continent had gone out first to meet them, all unweeting that it was the “corner-stone of a nation.” Now,—for lovers will be lovers still, although the whole body of Calvinism be behind them, and the lurking foe of the forest before,—they sat on the Burial Hill by night, and watched such a scene as William Allingham has pictured,— [Illustration: John Alden.] [Illustration] “Above the headlands massy, dim, A swelling glow, a fiery birth, A marvel in the sky doth swim, Advanced upon the hush of earth. “The globe, o’erhanging bright and brave The pale green-glimmering ocean-floor, Silvers its wave, its rustling wave Soft folded on the shelving floor. “O lonely moon, a lonely place Is this thou cheerest with thy face; Three sand-side houses, and afar The steady beacon’s faithful star”— only, instead of the three sand-side houses it was “the Seven Houses of Plymouth,” and all the beacon was the light in the “Mayflower’s” or the “Fortune’s” shrouds. That the betrothal did not impair the friendship of the lovers with the impetuous Captain Standish, we can understand from the fact that when, subsequently, the Captain built his house over on Duxbury Hill, John Alden’s house stood near it; and that later,—and unhindered, for aught we know,—John Alden’s daughter married the Captain’s son. It pleases me to think that the dear daughter-in-law, by whom, in his last will and testament, the old Captain desired to be buried, was the daughter of Priscilla Mullins. [Illustration]