over to Plymouth in two companies,19 apparently landing first at Salem and Charlestown. Thus the long and perilous emigration from England to America was consummated, and Holland knew the Pilgrims in the flesh no more.

CHAPTER XXIV.

EARLY LIFE IN THE COLONY.

HE life of the young colony sel

THE

dom has been described, but such descriptions are worth being attempted although that now to be given must be based, as the others have been, upon inferences from a few known facts rather than upon full records. The Pilgrims had no newspapers, and not many journals written by individuals among them have come down to us. Nor do many of their letters remain. Probably they corresponded only seldom with their friends in the mother country, for opportunities of communication were rare. Indeed, theirs was not a letter-writing age like our own, and most of their letters at this time must have related principally to business affairs or religious and ecclesiastical topics. John

PLYMOUTH IN 1622.

The first house on the left is the storehouse; then in order come the houses of P. Brown, J. Goodman, William Brewster, J. Billington, I. Allerton, F. Cooke, E. Winslow. The house in the enclosure on the right is that of Governor Bradford. The fort appears at the top of the hill.

Robinson's last letters, written from Leyden in December, 1623, to Governor Bradford and Elder Brewster,1 although sent to the colony instead of from it, and the more than thirty contents of Governor Bradford's own Letter-Book,2 written by various persons, probably are fair examples of the usual character of the correspondence of the period, at any rate among them, and contain very little of the personal or general information, except upon the classes of subjects just suggested, with which most modern letters abound.

The habits and manners of the Pilgrims were so simple and so similar in general to those of their friends at home that it hardly would have been natural for them to describe such things at length upon paper. Some significant statements occur in Governor Bradford's history and in accounts of their observations in the colony by a few such visitors as De Rasieres, already mentioned, but these are incomplete and far from numerous. It is pos