If even it had been possible to run the gauntlet of the Indian villages, war parties, and hunting bands, what would have been before us but endless forest and a winter which for us would have had no spring?
I could not see her die of hunger and cold, or by the teeth of the wolves.

I could not do what I should have liked to do,--take, single-handed, that King's ship with its sturdy crew and sail with her south and ever southwards, before us nothing more formidable than Spanish ships, and beyond them blue waters, spice winds, new lands, strange islands of the blest.
There seemed naught that I could do, naught that she could do.

Our Fate had us by the hands, and held us fast.

We stood still, and the days came and went like dreams.
While the Assembly was in session I had my part to act as Burgess from my hundred.

Each day I sat with my fellows in the church, facing the Governor in his great velvet chair, the Council on either hand, and listened to the droning of old Twine, the clerk, like the droning of the bees without the window; to the chant of the sergeant-at-arms; to long and windy discourses from men who planted better than they spoke; to remarks by the Secretary, witty, crammed with Latin and traveled talk; to the Governor's slow, weighty words.