So well, however, did he fill the larger sphere for which his ambitious nature perhaps had secretly pined, that after four years of arduous service when the Massachusetts quarrel was well adjusted, and Winslow would have returned home, President Steele, whom he had helped to found the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, wrote to the Colonial Commissioners in New England that although Winslow was unwilling to be kept longer from his family, he could not yet be spared, because his great acquaintance and influence with members of Parliament made him invaluable to the work in hand.
Then in 1652 the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, placed him at the head of a committee for settling a Dutch quarrel; and in 1655 the same power named him governor of Hispaniola, and dispatched him thither with a fleet and body of soldiers to conquer and take possession of his new territory. But General Venable in command of the soldiers, and Admiral Penn in command of the fleet, fell to loggerheads as to which was the other's superior, and even Winslow's diplomacy could not heal the breach; so the attack upon Hispaniola proved a disgraceful failure, and as the fleet sailed away to attack Jamaica, the Great Commissioner, as they called him fell ill of chagrin and worry, and after a few days of wild delirium wherein he stood upon Burying Hill, and drank of the Pilgrims' Spring, and spoke loving words to the wife and children he should see no more, he died, and was committed to the great deep with a salute of two-and-forty guns, and never a kiss or tear, for all who loved him were far away.
But all this honor, all this disaster, lies in the future, for as yet Winslow is only seven-and-twenty, and yet the lines of ambition, of weariness, of hauteur are foreshadowed upon his face; already Time with his light indelible pencil has faintly traced the furrows he by and by will plow that all who run may read.
Perhaps the least change of all is that upon the captain's face, for before ever he landed on the Rock full twenty years of a soldier's life had set those firm lips, and steadied those marvelous eyes, and impressed upon every line of the deep bronzed face the air of the vigilant commander who was both born and bred for the post he fills so thoroughly. If any change, perhaps there is a softening one, for those keen eyes have looked so often upon misery and need, and so little upon bloodshed in these three last years, that they have gained somewhat of tenderness, somewhat of human sympathy; and the look that dying men and women have strained their glazing eyes to see to the last, is not so far from the surface as once it was. But the governor is speaking,--