cord of Christmas for next year and find that
Bradford writes: "One ye day called Chrismas-day, ye Gov'r caled them
out to worke (as was used)," I cannot help thinking that the leaders had
a grim feeling of satisfaction in "secularizing" the first Christmas as
thoroughly as they did. They wouldn't work on Sunday, and they would
work on Christmas.

They did their best to desecrate Christmas, and they did it by laying
one of the cornerstones of an empire.

Now, if the reader wants to imagine the scene,--the Christmas
celebration or the Christmas desecration, he shall call it which he
will, according as he is Roman or Puritan himself,--I cannot give him
much material to spin his thread from. Here is the little story in the
language of the time:

"Munday the 25. day, we went on shore, some to fell tymber, some to saw,
some to riue, and some to carry, so no man rested all that day, but
towards night some as they were at worke, heard a noyse of some Indians,
which caused vs all to goe to our Muskets, but we heard no further, so
we came aboord againe, and left some twentie to keepe the court of gard;
that night we had a sore storme of winde and rayne.

"Munday the 25. being Christmas day, we began to drinke water aboord,
but at night the Master caused vs to have some Beere, and so on board we
had diverse times now and then some Beere, but on shore none at all."

There is the story as it is told by the only man who chose to write it
down. Let us not at this moment go into an excursus to inquire who he
was and who he was not. Only diligent investigation has shown beside
that this first house was about twenty feet square, and that it was for
their common use to receive them and their goods. The tradition says
that it was on the south side of what is now Leyden street, near the
declivity of the hill. What it was, I think no one pretends to say
absolutely. I am of the mind of a dear friend of mine, who used to say
that, in the hardships of those first struggles, these old forefathers
of ours, as they gathered round the fires (which they did have--no
Christian Registers for them to warm their cold hands by), used to
pledge themselves to each other in solemn vows that they would leave to
posterity no detail of the method of their lives. Posterity should not
make pictures out of them, or, if it did, should make wrong ones; which
accordingly, posterity has done. What was the nature, then, of this
twenty-foot-square store-house, in