rds, "I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their almost
desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five-months' passage,
on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and exhausted from the voyage,
poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their
ship-master for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water
on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile
tribes."

Little did these men of 1620 think that the time would come when ships
would go round the world without a can of beer on board; that armies
would fight through years of war without a ration of beer or of spirit,
and that the builders of the Lawrences and Vinelands, the pioneer towns
of a new Christian civilization, would put the condition into the
title-deeds of their property that nothing should be sold there which
could intoxicate the buyer. Poor fellows! they missed the beer, I am
afraid, more than they did the play at Christmas; and as they had not
yet learned how good water is for a steady drink, the carnal mind almost
rejoices that when they got on board that Christmas night, the
curmudgeon ship-master, warmed up by his Christmas jollifications, for
he had no scruples, treated to beer all round, as the reader has seen.
With that tankard of beer--as those who went on board filled it, passed
it, and refilled it--ends the history of the first Christmas in New
England.

* * * * *

It is a very short story, and yet it is the longest history of that
Christmas that I have been able to find. I wanted to compare this
celebration of Christmas, grimly intended for its desecration, with some
of the celebrations which were got up with painstaking intention. But,
alas, pageants leave little history, after the lights have smoked out,
and the hangings have been taken away. Leaving, for the moment, King
James's Christmas and Englishmen, I thought it would be a pleasant thing
to study the contrast of a Christmas in the countries where they say
Christmas has its most enthusiastic welcome. So I studied up the war in
the Palatinate,--I went into the chronicles of Spain, where I thought
they would take pains about Christmas,--I tried what the men of "la
religion," the Huguenots, were doing at Rochelle, where a great assembly
was gathering. But Christmas day would not appear in memoirs or annals.
I tried Rome and the Pope, but he was dying, like the King of Spain, and
had not, I think,