Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/57

Rh not. But when I come to the record 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 corner-stones 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.

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 hard- ships 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 which, afterward, they used to sleep pretty compactly, no man can say. Dr. Young suggests a log cabin, but I do not believe that the log cabin was yet invented. I think it is more likely that the Englishmen rigged their two-handled saws—after the fashion known to readers of Sandford and Merton in an after age—and made plank for themselves. The material for imagination, as far as costume goes, may be got from the back of a fifty-dollar national bank note, which the well-endowed reader will please take from his pocket, or from a