food for three days for one hundred
and twenty hungry men, ninety-one of them being Indians, with an
unbounded capacity for gluttonous gorging unsurpassed by any other race.
Doubtless the deer, and possibly the great turkeys, were roasted in the
open air. The picture of that Thanksgiving Day, the block-house with its
few cannon, the Pilgrim men in buff breeches, red waistcoats, and green
or sad-colored mandillions; the great company of Indians, gay in holiday
paint and feathers and furs; the few sad, overworked, homesick women, in
worn and simple gowns, with plain coifs and kerchiefs, and the pathetic
handful of little children, forms a keen contrast to the prosperous,
cheerful Thanksgivings of a century later.

There is no record of any special religious service during this week of
feasting.

The Pilgrims had good courage, stanch faith, to thus celebrate and give
thanks, for they apparently had but little cause to rejoice. They had
been lost in the woods, where they had wandered surbated, and had been
terrified by the roar of "Lyons," and had met wolves that "sat on thier
tayles and grinned" at them; they had been half frozen in their poorly
built houses; had been famished, or sickened with unwonted and
unpalatable food; their common house had burned down, half their company
was dead--they had borne sore sorrows, and equal trials were to come.
They were in dire distress for the next two years. In the spring of 1623
a drought scorched the corn and stunted the beans, and in July a fast
day of nine hours of prayer was followed by a rain that revived their
"withered corn and their drooping affections." In testimony of their
gratitude for the rain, which would not have been vouchsafed for private
prayer, and thinking they would "show great ingratitude if they
smothered up the same," the second Pilgrim Thanksgiving was ordered and
observed.

In 1630, on February 22d, the first public thanksgiving was held in
Boston by the Bay Colony, in gratitude for the safe arrival of
food-bearing and friend-bringing ships. On November 4, 1631, Winthrop
wrote again: "We kept thanksgiving day in Boston." From that time till
1684 there were at least twenty-two public thanksgiving days appointed
in Massachusetts--about one in two years; but it was not a regular
biennial festival. In 1675, a time of deep gloom through the many and
widely separated attacks from the fierce savages, there was no public
thanksgiving celebrated in either Massac