On this occasion the day, which was kept with marked earnestness and solemnity, opened with a cloudless sky, while the sun poured its clear, scorching rays full upon the shrinking plains; but lo, says Winslow in his recital, ere the close of the services, “the sky was overcast, the clouds gathered on all sides, and on the next morning distilled such soft, sweet, and moderate showers of rain, continuing some fourteen days, and mixed with such seasonable weather, as it was hard to say whether our withered corn or our drooping affections were most quickened and revived, such was the bounty and goodness of our God.”[445] Habbamak, who was in Plymouth at this time, exclaimed as the rain began to fall, “Now I see that the Englishman’s God is a good God, for he has heard you, and sent you rain, and that without storms and tempests, which we usually have with our rain, and which beat down our corn; but yours stands whole and erect still; surely your God is a good God.”[446] But while these timely and gentle showers saved their crop and secured the future, the pinching want of the passing days was not stayed. Indeed, so bitter grew the famine, that on one occasion the colony was reduced to a single pint of corn; which, when divided among the Pilgrims, gave each five kernels.[447] During the height of this suffering, a package of home-letters was received. From these the settlers gleaned some news which was of interest to them. It seems that Mr. John Pierce, in whose name their patent had been taken,[448] had grown covetous, and attempted to play both the Pilgrims and the Merchant-adventurers false. When he saw “how hopefully the Plymouth colony was seated,” the trustee grew desirous of becoming lord-proprietary, and holding them as his tenants, “to sue in his courts as lord.”[449] So he surreptitiously sued out a new patent, of much larger extent, in his own name, and then fitted out an expedition headed by himself, to go and take possession of his usurped domain.[450] But “God marvellously crossed him.” “Having sailed no farther than the Downs,” says Cotton Mather, “his ship sprang a leak; and besides this disaster, which alone was enough to have stopped the voyage, one strand of the cable was accidentally cut, by which means it broke in a stress of wind, and all were in extreme danger of being wrecked upon the sands. Having with much cost recruited this loss, and increased the number of emigrants, Pierce again put to sea; but in mid-ocean one of the saddest and longest storms known since the days of the apostle Paul drove the ship home to England once more, the vessel well-nigh torn to pieces, and the emigrants, though all saved, weary and affrighted. Pierce, by all his tumbling backward and forward, was by this time grown so sick of his patent that he vomited it up. He assigned it over to the home company;[451] but they afterwards obtained another, under the umbrage whereof they could more effectually carry on the affairs of their colony.”[452]