d--lies as it does to-day, but save for
these main topographical outlines the Plymouth at which we are looking
in our imagination would be quite unrecognizable to us.

There is a little row of houses--seven of them--that is all. Log cabins,
two-roomed, of the crudest build, thatched with wildgrass, the chinks
between the logs filled with clay, the floors made of split logs;
lighted at night with pieces of pitch pine. Each lot measures three rods
long and a rod and a half wide, and they run on either side of the
single street (the first laid out in New England, and ever afterward to
be known as Leyden Street), which, in its turn, is parallel to the Town
Brook. There is no glass in these cabin windows: oiled paper suffices;
the household implements are of the fewest. The most primitive modern
camping expedition is replete with luxuries of which this colony knows
nothing. They have no cattle of any kind, which means no milk or
butter; they have no poultry or eggs. Twenty-six acres of cultivated
ground--twenty-one of corn, the other five of wheat, rye, and
barley--have been quite enough for the twenty-one men and six boys (all
who were well enough to work) to handle, but it is not a great deal to
feed them all. At one end of the street stands the common house, twenty
feet square, where the church services are held; the store-house is near
the head of the pier; and at the top of what is now Burial Hill is the
timber fort, twenty by twenty, built the January before by Myles
Standish. In April, 1621, this is all there is to what is now the
prosperous town of Plymouth.

And yet--not entirely. There are a few things left in the Plymouth of
to-day which were in the Plymouth of three hundred years ago. If our man
and maid should turn into Pilgrim Hall their eyes would fall upon some
of the selfsame objects which were familiar sights to them in 1621.
Those sturdy oaken chairs of Governor Carver, Elder Brewster, and
Edward Winslow; the square, hooded wooden cradle brought over by Dr.
Samuel Fuller; and the well-preserved reed one which rocked Peregrine
White, and whose quaint stanchness suggests the same Dutch influence
which characterizes the spraddling octagonal windmills--they would
quickly recognize all of these. Some of the books, too, chiefly
religious, some in classic tongues, William Bradford's Geneva Bible
printed in 1592, and others bearing the mark of 1615, would be well
known to them, although we must not take it for gr