estion of peace or war a little further
before bringing it to an open issue. At any rate, they were no more seen
at present, and the colonists wasted no time in pursuing them, but as
the ground dried and warmed hastened to put in such grain and garden
seeds as they had provided, and to lay out the little plots of ground
attached to each house. Among the other crops was one whose harvest no
man, woman, or child of that well-nigh famished company would have
eaten, a crop of wheat whose ripened seeds were allowed to fall as they
would, to sink again into the earth, or to feed the birds of heaven, for
it was sown above the leveled graves of that half the Pilgrims who in
the first four months found the city that they sought. So numerous and
so prominent upon the bold bluff of Cole's Hill were these graves
becoming, that Standish, overlooking the town from the Fort and his home
close beneath its walls, pointed out to Carver and Bradford that the
savages, doubtless as keen-eyed as himself, would in seeing how many of
the invaders were under ground find courage to attack those still
living, and it was his proposal that the earth should be leveled and
planted.

"To what crop?" asked Bradford.

"It matters not," replied Standish a little impatiently. "No man will
care to eat of it, knowing what lies beneath."

"'Thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance
of wheat or of some other grain, but God giveth it a body,'" quoted
Carver in a low voice, and Standish reverently answered,--

"Ay. Let it be wheat, since that is Paul's order."

But that night as the sun was setting behind the gloomy evergreen forest
closing the western horizon, the captain, avoiding his comrades, went
quietly up the hill to the Fort, and thence made a circuit northward and
eastward so as to come out upon the bluff of Cole's Hill. Passing among
the graves with careful feet he presently stood beside one, mounded and
shaped with care, and protected by willow rods bent over it and into the
ground at either side. Recently cut, these boughs yet bore their pretty
catkins, and the leaves which had already started seemed inclined to
persist in life and growth.

Removing his buff-cap and folding his arms Standish stood long beside
this grave, silent and almost stern of look, but his heart eloquent with
that deep and inarticulate language in which great souls commune with
God, and with those mysteries of life so far transcending man's
c