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have ever prayed unto Thee, that it might have the first and the latter rain, and that she might stretch her branches to the sea and to the flood. The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes. I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart; I have, though a despised weed, labored with good will for all men. If any have been enemies, I thought not of them; neither hath the sun set upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from all superfluity of maliciousness. Thousand have been my sins, and ten thousand my transgressions; but Thy sanctifications have remained within me, and mine heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal on thine altar.

O Lord my strength! I have since my youth, met with Thee in all my ways; by Thy fatherly compassions; by Thy comfortable chastisements; by Thy visible providences. As Thy favors have increased upon me, so have Thy corrections. Thus Thou hast always been near me, O Lord, and ever as my worldly blessings were exalted; so secret darts from Thee have pierced me; that when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before Thee.

And now, when I thought most of peace and honor, Thine hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me according to thy former loving kindness; keeping me

still in Thy school, not as an alien but a child. Just are Thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to Thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea? Earth, heavens, and all these, are nothing to Thy mercies! I confess before Thee, that I am debtor to Thee, for the precious talent of Thy gifts and graces, which I have neither put into a napkin, nor put out as I ought, to exchangers, where it might have made best profit; but misspent it in things for which I was least fit; so I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the house of her pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me, O Lord, for my Saviour's sake; and receive me unto Thy bosom, or guide me in Thy way.

1604

ANN ELIOT.

Ir was a peculiar blessing of the Rev. John Eliot, styled in the early history of New England, the Apostle of the Indians, to have had during the self-denial and hardship of his lot, for so many years the solace of a most careful, loving, and pious wife, who found in her home duties, her highest happi

ness.

Ann Mountfort, born in England in 1604, was the cherished object of his young affections. They were affianced, ere he left his native land in 1631, at the age of 27, to bear the message of the Gospel to what was then called the western wilderness. It was deemed prudent by their relatives that the marriage should not

take place, until he had gone over and decided on some permanent abode, and made such preparation for her arrival as circumstances might allow.

The blasts of November were bleak and searching, when after long tossing upon the deep, he landed with his small band of colonists upon the shores of Massachusetts. After officiating a short time in Boston, he decided on a settlement in Roxbury, and sent to hasten his betrothed to his home and to his heart. Under the care of friends who were to emigrate to that region, Ann Mountfort bade a life's farewell to the scenes of her infancy, and those who had nurtured it, and committed herself to a boisterous ocean. The comforts that modern science has invented for the traveller on the trackless deep, were then unknown. No noble steamer, with its lofty deck and luxurious state-rooms appeared with the promise of speed and safety, and with power to make winds and waves subservient to its will.

Only a frail, rocking bark was there, which the billows seemed to mock. Wearisome days and nights, and many of them, were appointed

to those who adventured their lives in such a craft. But the affianced bride shrank not. Often, amid storms "mounting up to the heavens, and going down to the depths," and long by the dreary prospect of sea and skies, and by the loathing heart-sickness which neither pen or tongue hath described, was the complexion of her love, and the fabric of her faith tested; and both triumphed.

At length the New World stretched as a thin cloud to their view. More tardy than ever, seemed the movements of the way-worn vessel. Hovering upon the coast, the autumnal brilliance of American forests and thickets, the crimson, the orange, and the umbered brown, blending, receding, and contrasting beneath the bright rays of an October sun, struck the daughter of the dimmer skies of England as a gorgeous dream of fairy-land.

The joy of the patriarch who going forth to "meditate at the eventide," saw the arching necks of the camels that bore to his mother's tent the daughter of Bethuel, surpassed not his, who after long watching, and vainly questioning the sullen billows, at length descried

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