“And yet, methinks, our children are as cheerful, fat, and lusty, with feeding upon those mussels, clams, and other fish, as they were in England with their fill of bread.” Higginson, himself a dyspeptic, “continually in physic,” as he says, and accustomed to dress in thick clothing, and to comfort his stomach with drink that was “both strong and stale,”--the “jolly good ale and old,” I suppose, of free and easy Bishop Still's song,--found that he both could and did oftentimes drink New England water very well,--which he seems to look upon as a remarkable feat. He could go as lightclad as any, too, with only a light stuff cassock upon his shirt, and stuff breeches without linings. Two of his children were sickly: one,--little misshapen Mary,--died on the passage, and, in her father's words, “was the first in our ship that was buried in the bowels of the great Atlantic sea;” the other, who had been “most lamentably handled” by disease, recovered almost entirely “by the very wholesomeness of the air, altering, digesting, and drying up the cold and crude humors of the body.” Wherefore, he thinks it a wise course for all cold complexions to come to take physic in New England, and ends with those often quoted words, that “a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old England's ale.” Mr. Higginson died, however, “of a hectic fever,” a little more than a year after his arrival. The medical records which I shall cite show that the colonists were not exempt from the complaints of the Old World. Besides the common diseases to which their descendants are subject, there were two others, to say nothing of the dreaded small-pox, which later medical science has disarmed,--little known among us at the present day, but frequent among the first settlers. The first of these was the scurvy, already mentioned, of which Winthrop speaks in 1630, saying, that it proved fatal to those who fell into discontent, and lingered after their former conditions in England; the poor homesick creatures in fact, whom we so forget in our florid pictures of the early times of the little band in the wilderness. Many who were suffering from scurvy got well when the Lyon arrived from England, bringing store of juice of lemons. The Governor speaks of another case in 1644; and it seems probable that the disease was not of rare occurrence.