Buying Cattle

Governor Calvert was not minded that we should put all dependence for food upon these wild things; but straightway the people had taken up their abode on shore, he sent the Dove, with a sufficient crew of seamen, to Jamestown in Virginia, and my uncle, representing our governor, there bought six yoke of oxen, fourteen cows, no less than thirty pigs, and a large flock of poultry, bringing the live stock back to us at St. Mary's without low.

I may as well confess here, that even though I had had no home in England when my father was elsewhere, it required I should exert all my will to prevent a certain feeling of homesickness, despite the fact that we had come to a land which was so fair, and had found the savages so friendly. That I was so far away from all those whom I had known since it was possible to remember faces, caused a pain at my heart such as I can cannot describe.

Save for my father, my uncle, and John, it seemed as if there was no one in all the world of America who stood near me, and when I laid myself down at night upon one of those Indian beds made of saplings, I could not prevent the tears from overflowing my eyelids.

And now let him who will laugh at me; but yet it remains true, that when these cattle, with the swine and fowls, were brought to our town of St. Mary's, my sickness for home was more than half banished.

To hear the cocks crowing in the morning, even as I had heard them in England, or to listen to the lowing of the cows as they stood patiently waiting to be relieved from their burden of milk, was soothing to such a degree that straightway, and for the first time, did I feel as if I had really come to my home.