tiful 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but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost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, {343} 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_, of _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 drun