A third attempt, while hardly more successful, furnishes one of the gayest and prettiest episodes in the whole history of New England. Across the somber procession of earnest-faced men and women, across the psalm-singing and the praying, across the incredible toil of the pioneers at Plymouth now flashes the brightly costumed and pleasure-loving courtier, Thomas Morton. An agent of Gorges, Morton with thirty followers floated into Wessagusset to found a Royalist and Episcopalian settlement. This Episcopalian bias was quite enough to account for Bradford's disparaging description of him as a "kind of petie-fogie of Furnifells Inn," and explains why the early historians never made any fuller or more favorable record than absolutely necessary of these neighbors of theirs, although the churchman Samuel Maverick admits that Morton was a "gentleman of good qualitee." But it was for worse sins than his connection with the Established Church that Morton's name became synonymous with scandal throughout the whole Colony. In the very midst of the dun-colored atmosphere of Puritanism, in the very heart of the pious pioneer settlement this audacious scamp set up, according to Bradford, "a schoole of atheisme, and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves as if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of y^e Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practises of y^e madd Bachanalians." The charge of atheism in this case seems based on the fact that Morton used the Book of Common Prayer, but as for the rest, there is no question that this band of silken merry-makers imported many of the carnival customs and hereditary pastimes of Old England to the stern young New England; that they fraternized with the Indians, shared their strong waters with them, and taught them the use of firearms; and that Merrymount became indeed a scene of wildest revelry.