the danger of running short of
provisions.

The day came at length when of all the company, numbering a hundred and
one when they landed, only seven remained able either to nurse the sick
or bury the dead, and hour by hour, as these met about their complicated
duties, they studied each others faces, in terror of seeing the fatal
signs that yet one more was stricken down, and the annihilation of the
settlement one step farther advanced.

Of these seven, two were Elder Brewster and Myles Standish, and well did
they prove themselves fit to be rulers among the people, for they
became servants of all, without hesitation and without affectation,
nursing, cooking, dressing loathsome wounds, and ministering in all
those homely ways repugnant to refined senses, and especially, perhaps,
to the dignity of man. The doctor also kept on foot, although terribly
worn with sleeplessness, fatigue, and rheumatism; Peter Browne, none the
worse for his day and night in the woods, with Francis Eaton to help
him, took charge of digging the graves and burying the dead, already in
their silent colony along the brow of Cole's Hill, almost equaling their
yet suffering comrades. The two remaining sound ones were Stephen
Hopkins and Helen Billington, who, as the only female nurse, was called
upon to attend the sick women, so far as she could; this, of course,
gave but little time for each patient, and one night the doctor
hurriedly said to Standish,--

"Captain, wilt have an eye to-night to those two beds in the corner?
'T is Priscilla Molines and Desire Minter, both shrewdly burned with
fever, and needing medicine and care lest they should fall to raving
before morning. I'd not ask thee, knowing all thou hast on hand, but
goodwife Billington must not quit"--

"Nay, nay, what needs so many words," interrupted Standish. "Give me
their medicine and directions, I can care for them well enow and for
Bradford whose huckle-bone[4] giveth him sore distress to-night."

[4] Hip-bone.

"I doubt me if he wins through," said the Doctor softly; "and White and
Molines will never see the morning, and Mistress Winslow is going
fast--well, I leave the maids and Bradford to thee."

"Ay, I'll do my best," replied Standish briefly.

And so it came to pass that Priscilla Molines, moaning in her feverish
unrest, felt a moist linen laid upon her brow and a cup held to her
parched lips.

"Petite maman!" murmured she, and with those moistened lips kissed the
ha