i85o 179 importunate. Often has the stump of a hand been actually thrust into my face. The frequency of such objects of disease, unnatural distortions, and deformities of the human body, such as are rare in England, lend confirmation to what has been told me that these distortions have been wilfully produced. There was a Scottish family, named Anderson, we knew. With the son I got on fairly wTell till he lent me a book on " The Pilgrim Fathers," and I expressed my opinion to him pretty freely as to what I thought of this party. I told him that to my mind they were a parcel of ill-ponditioned, cantankerous rascals of whom England was well rid, and, considering the hideous murders of unfortunate witches that they committed, and the barbarities of which they were guilty perpetrated on the Quakers> my regret was that the old slaver Mayflower had not sunk on the voyage and taken the whole set to the bottom of the Atlantic to feed the fishes.1 He was very angry, and our friendship underwent a frost after this expression of my opinion. I am confident that he told the Buscarlets what I had said, for they were thenceforth stiff and stand-offish towards me, and M. Buscarlet would barely notice me when we passed in the street. That affected neither my appetite nor my sleep. All the time we were abroad I never went to a Roman Catholic service. The only ceremony that I witnessed was the Fete-Dieu. At this time I made my first purchase of a book with my pocket-money. It was a Tacitus : too hard Latin for me at the time, but it was Latin, and was history, and that sufficed. The second book I purchased with a little sum left me by my grandfather, was Knight's Pictorial History of England in eight thick quartos, each containing from 800 to 900 pages, the letter-press in double columns. The authors wTere G. L. Craik and C. MacFarlane, and it might more justly be entitled a History of Scotland with account of transactions in the adjacent kingdom of 1 The Pilgrim Fathers migrated from the Netherlands, putting into Plymouth on their way. They left Holland because they did not approve of the way in which the Dutch Calvinists neglected to keep the "Sabbath." Moreover they were torn into factions, denouncing and excommunicating one another. It was but one of these factions that started to find a home in a New Land, where they might bully and imprison and put to death such as did not agree with them.
