Cooke, the comic actor, who hated to be crowded, once so successfully used upon a stage-driver his extraordinary power of changing the expression of his face,—getting in at one door of the coach, slipping out of the one opposite, and again presenting himself with a new style of visage,—that he took all the inside to himself. And so it has been with the New England character. It has so many phases that it requires almost the entire omnibus of American history to itself. One point is quite certain, that the first settlers had a hard place to land on, and a great many sharp Indian points to provide against after they had landed. St. Augustine was fifty-five, Jamestown fourteen, and the baby Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island ten years of age, when the little English congregation which had passed thirteen years at Leyden in Holland,—stowed away in two small vessels, one of sixty and the other of one hundred and eighty tons,—stepped out of their cold cabins upon the colder rock of Plymouth. It was four days before Christmas; but for want of good fireplaces they did not hang up their stockings. It was as much as they could do to keep from hanging themselves. Their nearest white neighbors were at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, five hundred miles distant,—a trifle too far away to invite New-Year’s calls. Most of the party were obliged to wade on shore, thus breaking the ice for those who followed; the spray of the sea freezing as it fell upon them, making them quite ice-clad, in fact almost as shaggy and pointed as their inside purposes and character. They carried on shore one dead body, the only one who had died on the voyage of one hundred and six days; the first planting in that field, which in time, like the rest of the world, was to be claimed as God’s acre. [Illustration: LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS AND MOTHERS. (p. 118) ] The soil upon which they settled bore more charters, Indian arrows, and gravestones than pumpkins or corn; and even two years after the landing, we are told that the stock on hand of the latter was so small that only five kernels were allowed for each private,—an allowance which, since the great Rebellion, seems incredibly small.