and high-priced crop, tobacco, had given
the Indians firearms to go hunting game for them; and the lesson of easy
killing with powder and shot, when once learned, was turned with havoc
upon the white men. The following year comparatively little corn was
planted, as the luxuriant foliage made a perfect ambush for the close
approach of the savages to the settlements. There was, of course,
scarcity and famine as the result; and a bushel of corn-meal became
worth twenty to thirty shillings, which sum had a value equal to twenty
to thirty dollars to-day. The planters were each compelled by the
magistrates the following year to raise an ample amount of corn to
supply all the families; and to save a certain amount for seed as well.
There has been no lack of corn since that time in Virginia.

The French colonists in Louisiana, perhaps because they were accustomed
to more dainty food than the English, fiercely hated corn, as have the
Irish in our own day. A band of French women settlers fairly raised a
"petticoat rebellion" in revolt against its daily use. A despatch of the
governor of Louisiana says of these rebels:--

"The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an
article of food; but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for
this food a dogged aversion, which has not been subdued. They
inveigh bitterly against His Grace, the Bishop of Quebec, who, they
say, has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them
to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise."

This hatred of corn was shared by other races. An old writer says:--

"Peter Martyr could magnifie the Spaniards, of whom he reports they
led a miserable life for three days together, with parched grain of
maize onlie"--

which, when compared with the diet of New England settlers for weeks at
a time, seems such a bagatelle as to be scarce worth the mention of
Peter Martyr. By tradition, still commemorated at Forefathers' Dinners,
the ration of Indian corn supplied to each person in the colony in time
of famine was but five kernels.

The stores brought over by the Pilgrims were poor and inadequate enough;
the beef and pork were tainted, the fish rotten, the butter and cheese
corrupted. European wheat and seeds did not mature well. Soon, as
Bradford says in his now famous _Log-Book_, in his picturesque and
forcible English, "the grim and grizzled face of starvation stared" at
them. The readie