the burthen greater; that if it had not been God's mercy, it is a wonder we had not sunk under it, especially other things occurring, whereby we were greatly crossed in our supplies for trade, by which these sums should have been repaid."

From the perusal of these extracts my readers will see both with what method and care Governor Bradford kept his various records for the History of the Colony, and what great and valuable light the contents of his Letter Book must have shed upon the continuous course of their affairs from the beginning. Three hundred and thirty-eight pages of that precious register served as the wrappers of English groceries in Halifax.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE ANTIQUITIES OF PLYMOUTH.-THE

HOUSES AND ARMOR

OF THE PILGRIMS.-DESCRIPTION OF THEIR MODE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP.

Ir is pleasant to feel, in visiting Plymouth, that there is no possibility of misplaced or mistaken enthusiasm. You may without doubt press with your own feet the spot first trodden by your fathers, to lay there the foundation of your New England home. The way in which this certainty has been preserved, and made now inextinguishable, is of no little interest. In the year 1741, there was living near Plymouth the last ruling elder in the first church of Plymouth, Thomas Faunce by name. He died not till the year 1745, at the great age of 99. Holmes, in his American Annals, says that Elder Faunce knew well the Rock on which the Pilgrims first landed, and that it was his tears, perhaps, which saved it from oblivion. In 1741, it formed part of the natural shore of the harbor, where the water flowed at highest tide, as when the Pilgrims stepped out from their shallop. There seems to have been neither wharf nor made land interrupting or concealing it. In that year the project was entertained of building a wharf, which would cover it, and the idea of thus losing from sight this sacred memorial of the Pilgrims, was so distressing to the vene

rable patriarch, that he wept on hearing of it, left his home at the age of 95, and "in the presence of many citizens" at Plymouth, pointed out that Rock as the very spot declared by the Pilgrims themselves, with whom he had been contemporary, to be the identical rock on which they landed. Deacon Ephraim Spooner, who was 52 years town clerk of Plymouth, and who died in 1818, at the age of 83, was present at the above-mentioned interview of the citizens at the Rock with Elder Faunce, in the year 1741.

When the Revolutionary conflict was impending, just before the breaking out of the war, the patriots of Plymouth are described as having undertaken, in the earnestness of their zeal, to remove the whole Pilgrim Rock, or a large part of it, to the Town Square, in order to make there a patriotic rendezvous and liberty-pulpit, to excite the people against the oppressions of England. In these energetic efforts, having split off a huge fragment of the Rock, they concluded to let the original ledge remain as it was, and by means of some twenty yoke of oxen dragged their prize to the Town Square, where they put up a liberty pole, and made the Rock one of the stepping-stones of American independence. There it remained till 1834, when it was with suitable ceremonies inaugurated as a sort of monumental sarcophagus, within the iron railing in front of Pilgrim Hall, where it is now to be seen. The people of Plymouth will not have done their duty to the original Rock, till they make a little park around it, down to the water's edge, where annually there might be a pleasant ceremony of landing from the sea, as solemn and magnificent as that of dropping a ring into the Adriatic at Venice, and much more glorious in its meaning. The Rock now in front of the Hall, with the inscribed names in black around it, might be apt to suggest to the mind the idea of a coffin or monumental urn, with the pall-bearers. It looks too hearse-like, for a pleasant impression, such as one would wish to have be

fore that relic, which is the emblem of life, not death, for New England.

The antiquities of the first band of the Puritans in New England are few, and therefore the more precious. What there are, are quite undoubted, and we have a feeling for them like that of Paul, when he spoke of the golden pot that had the manna, and Aaron's rod that budded; things, however sacred, which God did not suffer to be preserved, any more than the brazen serpent in the wilderness, lest they should produce a mongrel superstitious Romanism before its time; an earnest of the idolatry of the man of Sin and Son of Perdition before his development. Nevertheless, we would have been grateful had there been preserved one or two houses, with their furniture, of the earliest Pilgrim settlers in Plymouth. It is little more than two hundred years, and yet not a dwelling remains.

The first habitations constructed must have been inferior and rude, and in the whole of the first year's time they had but seven. Their houses were of thatched roofs, and from Mr. Winslow's letter contained in the volume of their Journal, it would appear that for windows, to keep out the weather and let in the light, they used paper, saturated with linseed oil. On occasions of state, such as the reception of Massasoit, the Indian king, they had a green rug that they could spread, and some cushions. From the beautiful specimen preserved in Pilgrim Hall, of the needlework of one of the daughters of Captain Miles Standish, we see that the New England women knew how to adorn their houses and make them comfortable. "She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with double garments." Not afraid of the snow! A New England characteristic, that. And how beautiful, with all that economy and industry of household

comfort, the higher delineation of the sacred writer, "She stretcheth out her hand to the poor, yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy."

They were all poor and sad and needy that first year, and many were dying; yet did they work while the day lasted, with cheerful, indefatigable courage. "We agreed," say the Pilgrims in their Journal, "that every man should build his own house, thinking by that course men would make more haste than working in common. The common house, in which for the first year we made our rendezvous, being nearly finished (a month or so after the landing), wanted only covering, it being about twenty feet square. Some should make mortar, and some gather thatch, so that in four days half of it was thatched. Frost and foul wea

ther hindered us much." Little room there was for ornament. Each man building his own house in this winter weather, would think himself but too happy in a dwelling of rough logs. And the timber had to be felled, and the stuff provided, in intervals between storms, and sometimes with musket in hand, for fear of sudden assaults from the savages. Would that one of those earliest houses, erected that first winter, had been preserved!

We have spoken of the mildness of this first winter. Wood says, in his New England's Prospect,* that it is observed by the Indians that every ten years there is little or no winter, an observation confirmed by the experience of the English; for the year of the Plymouth men's arrival was no winter in comparison; and in the tenth year likewise after that, when the great company settled in Massachusetts Bay, it was a very mild season. There was little frost and less snow, but clear serene weather, with but few Northwest winds, which was a great mercy to the settlers, so little protected from the severity of the weather. adds that the climate is much less cold-catching than in England, and in proof of this he gives the decorum of * Wood's New England's Prospect, p. 5.