ia were prayed over as marks
of demoniacal possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of
thought to be peopled with still stranger delusions.

Let us go before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and look at the shores
on which they were soon to land. A wasting pestilence had so thinned
the savage tribes that it was sometimes piously interpreted as having
providentially prepared the way for the feeble band of exiles. Cotton
Mather, who, next to the witches, hated the "tawnies," "wild beasts,"
"blood-hounds," "rattlesnakes," "infidels," as in different places he
calls the unhappy Aborigines, describes the condition of things in his
lively way, thus: "The Indians in these Parts had newly, even about a
Year or Two before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as
carried away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea't is said Nineteen
of Twenty) among them so that the Woods were almost cleared of those
pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth."

What this pestilence was has been much discussed. It is variously
mentioned by different early writers as "the plague," "a great and
grievous plague," "a sore consumption," as attended with spots which
left unhealed places on those who recovered, as making the "whole
surface yellow as with a garment." Perhaps no disease answers all these
conditions so well as smallpox. We know from different sources what
frightful havoc it made among the Indians in after years,--in 1631,
for instance, when it swept away the aboriginal inhabitants of "whole
towns," and in 1633. We have seen a whole tribe, the Mandans, extirpated
by it in our own day. The word "plague" was used very vaguely, as in
the description of the "great sickness" found among the Indians by the
expedition of 1622. This same great sickness could hardly have been
yellow fever, as it occurred in the month of November. I cannot think,
therefore, that either the scourge of the East or our Southern
malarial pestilence was the disease that wasted the Indians. As for the
yellowness like a garment, that is too familiar to the eyes of all who
have ever looked on the hideous mask of confluent variola.

Without the presence or the fear of these exotic maladies, the forlorn
voyagers of the Mayflower had sickness enough to contend with. At their
first landing at Cape Cod, gaunt and hungry and longing for fresh food,
they found upon the sandy shore "great mussel's, and very fat and
full of sea-pearl." Sailors and