Willis G. Clark.
God has transmuted the primal curse into a blessing. Labor is a panacea for many ills; and now the fullness of their new life crowded out homesickness and all fainting of the heart among the Pilgrim exiles. They had no time for dreams. The weighty cares of the present exorcised every fevered phantom of regret and apprehension.
Swiftly and pleasantly in the manifold employments of the field passed the glowing, pregnant spring. The exiles knew that they were set to subdue the wilderness, to marry the continent with roads, to dot the forests with schools and churches and hamlets. Daily and nightly they invoked God’s blessing on their infant colony; and with God’s kiss upon their brows, they toiled in the full assurance of success—they knew that hope would be changed to full fruition.
Thus far they had experienced no lack of food. The variety afforded by wild fowl, fish, and the native fruits, together with the stores which they had brought with them in the “Mayflower,” amply sufficed to supply the cravings of hunger.[202] For the future the presage was good. The crops promised well. Six acres had been sown with pease and barley. Twenty acres had been planted with the seed-corn which it had been the good fortune of the exiles to dig out of the subterranean Indian storehouses;[203] this Squanto, the friendly Indian interpreter, had instructed them how to sow and till and manure with fish.[204]
“Like the swell of some sweet tune,
Morning rises into noon,
May glides onward into June;”
and as the season advanced, native grapes and berries were found in endless variety and inexhaustible abundance. The Pilgrim journalist also records that wild-flowers of various hues and “very sweet” fragrance contributed their beauty and incense to the charming summer scene.[205]
“A visitor to Plymouth, in this first summer of the Puritan settlement, as he landed on the southern side of a high bluff, would have seen, standing between it and a rapid little stream, a rude log-house, twenty feet square, containing the common property of the plantation. Proceeding up a gentle acclivity between two rows of log-cabins, nineteen in number, some of them perhaps vacant since the death of their first tenants, he would have come to a hill, encircled by a plank platform for cannon. And glancing thence over the landscape, he might have counted twenty men at work with hoes in the enclosures about the huts, or fishing in the shallow harbor, or visiting the woods or the beach for game; while six or eight women were busy in household affairs, and some twenty children, from infancy upward, completed the domestic picture.”[206]
The month of June found the colonists so far advanced in the necessary labors of the season, that they gained a little leisure to open the volume of local nature, and to scan its pages more accurately than had been possible in the haste of the initial December days.