years: but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest Country where God had prepared for them a City (Heb. xi. 16) and therein quieted their spirits. When they came to Delfs-Haven, they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them, followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leavs of them. . . . But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away that were thus loathe to depart, their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks, commended them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many tears, they took their leavs one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.
These several events did not appear to have any interrelation, but to be as remote in their moral as in their geographical association; but a retrospective glance reveals the truth that these incidents were acts in the same drama, cantos in the same epic, complementary in the moral world, the bane and antidote of the greatest moral offence of modern days.
When Samuel Lincoln attained the age of eighteen, he joined in the migration to New England then rife, and landed at Salem in Massachusetts, where he became an apprentice to Francis Lawes, a weaver, remaining until he attained his majority, when he shouldered his bundle and made his way on foot through the wilderness where now are Swampscott, Lynn, Chelsea, Boston, Braintree, and Quincy, to the hamlet of Hingham, which had been founded in the fall of 1635. In this same little hamlet, there had settled, in the year 1636, Thomas Lincoln, the miller, Thomas Lincoln, the cooper, and Thomas Lincoln, the weaver, the latter being a brother
