passengers indulged in the treacherous
delicacy; which seems to have been the sea-clam; and found that these
mollusks, like the shell the poet tells of, remembered their august
abode, and treated the way-worn adventurers to a gastric reminiscence of
the heaving billows. In the mean time it blew and snowed and froze.
The water turned to ice on their clothes, and made them many times like
coats of iron. Edward Tilley had like to have "sounded" with cold. The
gunner, too, was sick unto death, but "hope of trucking" kept him on his
feet,--a Yankee, it should seem, when he first touched the shore of New
England. Most, if not all, got colds and coughs, which afterwards turned
to scurvy, whereof many died.

How can we wonder that the crowded and tempest-tossed voyagers, many
of them already suffering, should have fallen before the trials of the
first winter in Plymouth? Their imperfect shelter, their insufficient
supply of bread, their salted food, now in unwholesome condition,
account too well for the diseases and the mortality that marked this
first dreadful season; weakness, swelling of the limbs, and other signs
of scurvy, betrayed the want of proper nourishment and protection from
the elements. In December six of their number died, in January eight, in
February, seventeen, in March thirteen. With the advance of spring
the mortality diminished, the sick and lame began to recover, and the
colonists, saddened but not disheartened, applied themselves to the
labors of the opening year.

One of the most pressing needs of the early colonists must have been
that of physicians and surgeons. In Mr. Savage's remarkable Genealogical
Dictionary of the first settlers who came over before 1692 and their
descendants to the third generation, I find scattered through the
four crowded volumes the names of one hundred and thirty-four medical
practitioners. Of these, twelve, and probably many more, practised
surgery; three were barber-surgeons. A little incident throws a glimmer
from the dark lantern of memory upon William Direly, one of these
practitioners with the razor and the lancet. He was lost between Boston
and Roxbury in a violent tempest of wind and snow; ten days afterwards
a son was born to his widow, and with a touch of homely sentiment, I had
almost said poetry, they called the little creature "Fathergone" Direly.
Six or seven, probably a larger number, were ministers as well as
physicians, one of whom, I am sorry to say, took t