American people who can trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East Anglian shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern countries—­Devonshire, Dorset, and Somerset—­which so long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of England.  I would not insist upon the exactness of such figures, in a matter where only a rough approximation is possible; but I do not think they overstate the East Anglian preponderance.  It was not by accident that the earliest counties of Massachusetts were called Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, or that Boston in Lincolnshire gave its name to the chief city of New England.  The native of Connecticut or Massachusetts who wanders about rural England to-day finds no part of it so homelike as the cosy villages and smiling fields and quaint market towns as he fares leisurely and in not too straight a line from Ipswich toward Hull.  Countless little unobtrusive features remind him of home.  The very names on the sign-boards over the sleepy shops have an unwontedly familiar look.  In many instances the homestead which his forefathers left, when they followed Winthrop or Hooker to America, is still to be found, well-kept and comfortable; the ancient manor-house built of massive unhewn stone, yet in other respects much like the New England farmhouse, with its long sloping roof and gable end toward the road, its staircase with twisted balusters running across the shallow entry-way, its low ceilings with their sturdy oaken beams, its spacious chimneys, and its narrow casements from which one might have looked out upon the anxious march of Edward IV. from Ravenspur to the field of victory at Barnet in days when America was unknown.  Hard by, in the little parish church which has stood for perhaps a thousand years, plain enough and bleak enough to suit the taste of the sternest Puritan, one may read upon the cold pavement one’s own name and the names of one’s friends and neighbours in startling proximity, somewhat worn and effaced by the countless feet that have trodden there.  And yonder on the village green one comes with bated breath upon the simple inscription which tells of some humble hero who on that spot in the evil reign of Mary suffered death by fire.  Pursuing thus our interesting journey, we may come at last to the quiet villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, on opposite banks of the river Idle, and just at the corner of the three shires of Lincoln, York, and Nottingham.  It was from this point that the Puritan exodus to America was begun. [Sidenote:  Puritanism was strongest in the eastern counties] [Sidenote:  Preponderance of East Anglia in the Puritan exodus]