. . . I knew it was you, when I heard your step in the passage,
For I was thinking of you as I sat there spinning and singing.
Dorothy had in full her mother's power of quiet devotion, and became a model mother, as well as minister's wife, for the parish at Hampton, N. H., where the young pastor began work in 1659, and where after twenty-eight years of such labor as came to all pioneers, she passed on, leaving nine children, whose name is still a familiar one in New England. Though the date of the next daughter's marriage is not quite as certain, it is given by some authorities as having taken place in the previous year, and in any case was within a few months of the same time. Contrary to the usual Puritan rule, which gave to most men from two to four wives, Sarah outlived her first husband, and married again, when a middle-aged but still young-hearted woman.
Marriage inevitably held some suggestion at least of merry-making, but the ceremony had been shorn of all possible resemblance to its English form. The Puritans were in terror lest any Prelatical superstitions or forms should cling to them in faintest degree, and Bradford wrote of the first marriage which took place in the Plymouth Colony: "The first marriage in this place, which, according to the laudable custom of the Low Countries, in which they had lived, was thought most requisite to be performed by the magistrate, as being a civil thing, . . . and nowhere found in the Gospel to be laid on the ministers as a part of their office."
Winthrop, three of whose marriages had been in the parish church of his English home, shared the
