The inhabitants of every
building on the road were in the open air, to receive and to return the
parting benediction. More than once, they, who guided his teams, were
commanded to halt, and all near, possessing human aspirations and human
responsibility, were collected to offer petitions in favor of him who
departed and of those who remained. The requests for mortal privileges
were somewhat light and hasty, but the askings in behalf of intellectual
and spiritual light were long, fervent, and oft-repeated. In this
characteristic manner did one of the first of the emigrants to the new
world make his second removal into scenes of renewed bodily suffering,
privation and danger.
Neither person nor property was transferred from place to place, in this
country, at the middle of the seventeenth century, with the dispatch and
with the facilities of the present time. The roads were necessarily few
and short, and communication by water was irregular, tardy, and far from
commodius. A wide barrier of forest lying between that portion of
Massachusetts-bay from which Mark Heathcote emigrated, and the spot, near
the Connecticut river, to which it was his intention to proceed, he was
induced to adopt the latter mode of conveyance.
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