garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned
the King of Christmas and bent the knee to the Lord of Misrule! Such
fantastic foolery is inconceivable in a Puritan community, and the
Maypole which was its emblem was the most inconceivable of all. This
"flower-decked abomination," ornamented with white birch bark, banners,
and blossoms, was the center of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As
Morton explains: "A goodly pine tree of eighty foote was reared up, with
a peare of bucks horns nayled on somewhere near to the top of it: where
it stood as a faire sea mark for directions how to find out the way to
mine host of Ma-re-mount." Around this famous, or infamous, pole Morton
and his band frolicked with the Indians on May Day in 1627. As the
indignant historian writes: "Unleashed pagans from the purlieus of the
gross court of King James, danced about the Idoll of Merry Mount,
joining hands with the lasses in beaver coats, and singing their ribald
songs."

It doesn't look quite so heinous to us, this Maypole dancing, as it did
to the outraged Puritans. In fact, the story of Morton and Merrymount is
one of the few glistening threads in the somber weaving of those early
days. But the New England soil was not prepared at that time to support
any such exotic, and Myles Standish was sent to disperse the frivolous
band, and to order Morton back to England, which he did, after a
scrimmage which Morton relates with great vivacity and doubtful veracity
in his "New English Canaan."

This "New English Canaan," by the way, had a rather singular career.
Morton tells in it many amusing stories, and one of them was destined to
a remarkable perpetuity in English literature. The story deals with the
Wessagusset settlers promising to hang one of their own members who had
been caught stealing--this hanging in order to appease the Indians.
Morton gravely states that instead of hanging the real culprit, who was
young and lusty, they hanged, in his place, another, old and sick. In
his quaint diction: "You all agree that one must die, and one shall die,
this young man's cloathes we will take off and put upon one that is old
and impotent, a sickly person that cannot escape death, such is the
disease on him confirmed, that die hee must. Put the young man's
cloathes on this man, and let the sick person be hanged in the other's
steade. Amen sayes one, and so sayes many more." This absurd notion of
vicarious atonement, spun purely from Morton's imagination,