anuscripts in the British Museum
(Otho and Caligula, if anybody else wants to look), and Mr. Sainsbury
let me look through all the portfolios I wanted in the State Paper
Office, and I am sure the letter was not there then. If anybody has
found it, it has been found since I was there. If it ever is found, I
should like to have it contain the following statement:--

"We got tired of playing by the fire, and so some of us ran down to the
brook, and walked till we could find a place to cross it; and so came up
to a meadow as large as the common place in Leyden. There was a good
deal of ice upon it in some places, but in some places behind, where
there were bushes, we found good store of berries growing on the ground.
I filled my apron, and William took off his jerkin and made a bag of it,
and we all filled it to carry up to the fire. But they were so sour,
that they puckered our mouths sadly. But my mother said they were
cranberries, but not like your cranberries in Lincolnshire. And, having
some honey in one of the logs the men cut down, she boiled the
cranberries and the honey together, and after it was cold we had it with
our dinner. And besides, there were some great pompions which the men
had brought with them from the first place we landed at, which were not
like Cinderella's, but had long tails to them, and of these my mother
and Mrs. Brewster and Mrs. Warren, made pies for dinner. We found
afterwards that the Indians called these pompions, _askuta squash_."

But this letter, I am sorry to say, has not yet been found.

Whether they had roast turkey for Christmas I do not know. I do know,
thanks to the recent discovery of the old Bradford manuscript, that
they did have roast turkey at their first Thanksgiving. The veritable
history, like so much more of it, alas! is the history of what they had
not, instead of the history of what they had. Not only did they work on
the day when all their countrymen played, but they had only water to
drink on the day when all their countrymen drank beer. This deprivation
of beer is a trial spoken of more than once; and, as lately as 1824, Mr.
Everett, in his Pilgrim oration, brought it in high up in the climax of
the catalogue of their hardships. How many of us in our school
declamations have stood on one leg, as bidden in "Lovell's Speaker,"
raised the hand of the other side to an angle of forty-five degrees, as
also bidden, and repeated, as also bidden, not to say compelled, the
wo