And thus with sober mirth and honest friendliness closed a day so important in the annals of the settlement.
CHAPTER XIV.
SECOND MARRIAGES.
Doubtless the Indians lurking in the woods of Watson's Hill had watched with wonder and alarm the process of mounting and securing the ordnance of the Fort, itself a novel structure in their eyes, and wisely concluded to consider the question of peace or war a little further before bringing it to an open issue. At any rate, they were no more seen at present, and the colonists wasted no time in pursuing them, but as the ground dried and warmed hastened to put in such grain and garden seeds as they had provided, and to lay out the little plots of ground attached to each house. Among the other crops was one whose harvest no man, woman, or child of that well-nigh famished company would have eaten, a crop of wheat whose ripened seeds were allowed to fall as they would, to sink again into the earth, or to feed the birds of heaven, for it was sown above the leveled graves of that half the Pilgrims who in the first four months found the city that they sought. So numerous and so prominent upon the bold bluff of Cole's Hill were these graves becoming, that Standish, overlooking the town from the Fort and his home close beneath its walls, pointed out to Carver and Bradford that the savages, doubtless as keen-eyed as himself, would in seeing how many of the invaders were under ground find courage to attack those still living, and it was his proposal that the earth should be leveled and planted.
"To what crop?" asked Bradford.
"It matters not," replied Standish a little impatiently. "No man will care to eat of it, knowing what lies beneath."
"'Thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain, but God giveth it a body,'" quoted Carver in a low voice, and Standish reverently answered,—
"Ay. Let it be wheat, since that is Paul's order."
But that night as the sun was setting behind the gloomy evergreen forest closing the western horizon, the captain, avoiding his comrades, went quietly up the hill to the Fort, and thence made a circuit northward and eastward so as to come out upon the bluff of Cole's Hill. Passing among the graves with careful feet he presently stood beside one, mounded and shaped with care, and protected by willow rods bent over it and into the ground at either side. Recently cut, these boughs yet bore their pretty catkins, and the leaves which had already started seemed inclined to persist in life and growth.