In this way and for these reasons the sanctity of the American home became peculiarly marked, and there arose in that home an atmosphere of holiness and purity that was in contrast to the households of other nations at that day. There is no more appropriate place than this, on the border line of the two epochs of colonization, when the American type began to be defined and recognized, for a brief glance at the American home in its spiritual features. As with the homes in rural England, but differing in this respect, as in so many others, from the city life of the mother country, the purity of the home was its most noteworthy and carefully conserved feature. In many respects there was likeness between the home of America and that of Holland; certainly, though in many aspects the resemblance failed, there was a closer resemblance than between the former and the home in any other nation. Whether this came from the brief sojourn of the Pilgrims in Holland cannot be said with certainty, though it seems most improbable; the greater likelihood is that the conditions which prevailed in colonial America were those best adapted to the genius of the Dutch people in the matter of domesticity, as later shown in the somewhat similar conditions and results in South Africa. Certain it is that the American home, like that of Holland, was in all ways, materially and morally, preeminently _clean_. There are many faults to be attributed to our ancestors north and south; but they had great virtues as well, and this of cleanliness in the home was one, and a great one. Even at this early day there was plenty of roystering and even vice in the colonies, more especially in Virginia, where the gay young blades ruffled it in imitation of the sparks of the court of the Stuarts; but the home was still preserved free from contamination. Woman was from the first held as a sacred thing, as a being to be reverenced and even worshipped, not with the affected gallantry of the English cavaliers or the French exquisites, but in all honesty and honor. They knew her value, these men of the old colonies; and they felt that an affront to her purity and virtue was a blow at the very foundation of the country they were learning to love. So it was that in America, as nowhere else, woman was in the mid-colonial days held in honor and honest reverence, and so it was that the American home, founded amid the clamor of the war-whoop and standing as the true stronghold of civilization, grew to be the finest emblem of the spirit of the new land and the noblest monument to the character and influence of its women. CHAPTER VI THE LATER COLONIAL PERIOD