Though the Indians gave the early settlers very little trouble, the wolves which howled around the settlement were alarming, and sometimes dangerous to the little children. Sometimes a bear would come ambling into “Boston Town.” The people’s cows were pastured on the Common. This made some people who wished to make fun of Boston claim that the narrow, crooked streets of that city were laid out by the cows, as they wandered down from the Common to drink at a certain spring. Sometimes the town suffered from disease and famine. One day, when Governor Winthrop had divided his last cupful of cornmeal with a starving beggar, he appointed a day of fasting and prayer to God for food. On the very day set for this fast, a ship arrived from England with provisions, and the people had a feast instead. Another time when the people did not have enough to eat, an Indian chief named Chickataubot came and presented the governor with a great quantity of corn. As with the Indians, so with the white settlers at first, it was either feast or famine. The people of Boston were kinder to the Indians than to the white men who failed to agree with them in religion. They banished the Baptists and hanged the Quakers. Besides Roger Williams, they drove out a good woman named Anne Hutchinson, because she argued too well against some of their beliefs. This gifted woman and her family were murdered and scalped by Indians in the log cabin in which they lived after they were banished from Boston. Governor Winthrop finally sent for his wife and his other children. One of his sons became governor of Connecticut. John Winthrop was twelve times elected governor of Massachusetts. More than once he was chosen deputy governor. He was good to the poor and unfortunate. In this he was far in advance of his time. It was said that he kept his private purse open for the public. Once, when he found that a man was stealing wood from his pile, he laughed and said he would stop that. He did so by inviting the man to come in the daytime and help himself to all the wood he needed. But the man never came again. Cotton Mather, one of the greatest of Boston preachers, said of Governor Winthrop that he was-- “The terror of the wicked, and delight of the sober, the envy of the many, but the hope of those who had any hopeful design in hand for the common good of the nation.” ROGER WILLIAMS, A MINISTER WHO LIVED THE GOLDEN RULE When the Pilgrim Fathers left Europe in the clumsy little ship, the _Mayflower_, they came to America to have freedom to think and act as they believed right in matters of religion. Many men in England who wished to have their own religious beliefs were called Puritans because they wished to purify the Church of England from things which they thought were wrong. King James of England had announced that they must all worship in the ways of the Church of England or he would “harry them out of the land.”