general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held.  It would be well if those who lament the decay of “faith” would remember what things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two hundred years ago.  It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and the rendezvous of those other “devil-worshipers” who celebrated there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis night.

The most important of original sources for the history of the settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and trustworthy.  Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation covers the period from 1620 to 1646.  The manuscript was used by later annalists but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost during the War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in England.  Winthrop’s Journal, or History of New England, begun on shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire until 1826.  It is of equal authority with Bradford’s, and perhaps, on the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and population, though not in priority of settlement.  The interest of Winthrop’s Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in any charm in the historian’s manner of recording them.  His style is pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers’ way of thinking.  For instance, of the year 1632:  “At Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake.  The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation:  that the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom.”  The reader of Winthrop’s Journal comes every-where upon hints which the imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance.  The germs of many of Longfellow’s New England Tragedies, of Hawthorne’s Maypole of Merrymount, and Endicott’s Red Cross, and of Whittier’s John Underhill and The Familists’ Hymn are all to be found in some dry, brief entry of the old Puritan diarist.  “Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year,” to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to the greatest American