The Pilgrim Read Online Free PDF Page A

bewitched by their melodious sound. He was charmed by similes, metaphors, and imagery, though he was unacquainted with those poetical terms until I taught them to him.
    He committed to memory vivid utterances in common speech that he had heard over the years in the market-place, in the streets, in the taverns, at fairs, &c. I wrote these down: “A press of people standing as close as mutton pies in an oven.” “From the sprig of his cap to his spangled shoe strap.” “Laughing like a ploughman at a Morris dance.” And then there was the verse of a song my uncle had learned at the Woodbury Fair held near Bere Regis about the eighteenth of every September:
    The plough is the Lord’s pen.
    It writes the land to sow our seed
    To feed the poor that stand in need.
    Neither the Prince nor peasants read
    Without this pen, or earn their bread.
    It bringeth increase to the most and least
    Such food as serveth man and beast.
    My uncle Roger said, “I’m a fool for words.” When next I looked upon a plough, I thought, “Thou art God’s pen.”
    Uncle Roger reciprocated for my reading Scripture to him by teaching me to load, prime, aim, discharge, and cleanse his musket. I learned to make char cloth from linen strips that ignited by striking sparks from a flint and steel upon the strip, and from the little fire, lighting the tip of the match cord, blowing on its coal to keep it smouldering, and using that to ignite the fine powder in the musket’s pan. The match cord, I discovered, was soaked in saltpeter, yet difficult to keep glowing in a high wind, rain, or snow. Roger also taught me how to mold bullets and goose-shot, with which we went hunting and fowling upon the Downs. He was a good marksman; I was not. As such, it was only by an intervention of Providence that my shot shattered the left elbow of the savage Massachusetts Indian in Wessagusset during the spring of 1623.
    â€¢ • •
    The Devil engendered my encounters with Jane Fuller. The daughter of Matthew Fuller, a miller in Winterbourne, she was a maid at The Sign of the Bull in the High East Street, whence I delivered some of my uncle’s cider in the spring of my sixteenth year. She was a year older than I and jested with me about my being shy.
    I said, “Fetch me a cup of ale.”
    She pulled at my sleeve and said, “You need not fear me.”
    I said, “I fear you not.”
    â€œThen come,” she said. “Come, drink a pot with me.” But I hastened through the door and onto the High East Street.
    I returned to The Sign of the Bull upon the following market day. Jane reiterated her previous request, and we drank a pot together. She and her father were parishioners of All Saints in the High Street. She fulminated against their rector, Mr. Lane, who had made a goodly profit selling corn to the Mayor for the poor and had become so proud he no longer spake to common folk in his congregation, like Jane and her father.
    I tried to persuade Jane to come to services at St. James, but she said, “I will stay with Mr. Lane. Does not Scripture say that pride goeth before a fall? Is that not Scripture? I want to be there when Mr. Lane stumbles and falls upon his bum. God is just; it will happen one day in church. Perhaps on his way to the pulpit. You wait and see!”
    I went to see Jane Fuller at The Sign of the Bull every market day for a month. We drank country brew. One afternoon, she wound the string of my shirt about her forefinger and entreated me to go a-maying with her. I refused to take part in a pagan ritual. But at dawn on May Day, I succumbed to temptation and walked into town. I saw Jane return with other maidens and lads from Conant’s wood, wherein they had sipped a drop or two of dew from the tips of their fingers.
    I confess that I joined them gathering green branches, Wind Flowers, violets, Early Purples, thyme, and Kingcups. Then we all went singing from door to