CHAP. VII.] PEREGRINE WHITE. 97 



New Orleans, and in other remote parts of the Union, we hear 

 of settlers from the North meeting on the 22d of December to 

 commemorate the birth-day of New England ; and when they 

 speak fondly of their native hills and valleys, and recall their 

 early recollections, they are drawing closer the ties which bind 

 together a variety of independent States into one great confeder 

 ation. 



Colonel Perkins, of Boston, well known for his munificence, 

 especially in founding the Asylum for the Blind, informed me, 

 in 1846, that there was but one link wanting in the chain of 

 personal communication between him and Peregrine White, the 

 first white child born in Massachusetts, a few days after the 

 Pilgrims landed. White lived to an advanced age, and was 

 known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom Colonel Perkins 

 visited, in 1807, with some friends who yet survive. Cobb died 

 in 1808, the year after Colonel Perkins saw him. He was then 

 blind ; but his memory fresh for every thing which had happened 

 in his manhood. He had served as a soldier at the taking of 

 Louisbourg in Cape Breton, in 1745, and remembered when 

 there were many Indians near Plymouth. The inhabitants 

 occasionally fired a cannon near the town to frighten them, and 

 to this cannon the Indians gave the name of &quot; Old Speakum.&quot; 



When we consider the grandeur of the results w 7 hich have 

 been realized in the interval of 225 years, since the Mayflower 

 sailed into Plymouth harbor how in that period a nation of 

 twenty millions of souls has sprung into existence and peopled a 

 vast continent, and covered it with cities, and churches, schools, 

 colleges, and railroads, and filled its rivers and ports with steam 

 boats and shipping we regard the Pilgrim relics with that kind 

 of veneration which trivial objects usually derive from high an 

 tiquity alone. For we measure time not by the number of arith 

 metical figures representing years or centuries, but by the import 

 ance of a long series of events, which strike the imagination. 

 When I expressed these sentiments to a Boston friend, he asked 

 me, &quot; Why, then, may we not believe in the relics of the early 

 Christians displayed at Rome, which they say the mother of 

 Constantine brought home from the Holy Land only three cen- 

 VOL. i. E 



