Busy days followed. Land was allotted, hunting parties were sent out; Indians were chatted with; and thanksgivings for the past and prayers for the future were offered.[690] But, enfeebled by fevers and enervated by the scurvy, while the deceitful river and the marshy ground in its vicinity bred contagious and miasmal vapors to enshroud them nightly, the emigrants made little progress in their most important work, the erection of a town. Daily the sickness increased, and it haunted Salem as well as infant Cambridge. In August there was a large mortality; but September was the most dreary month. Francis Higginson, who had been for some time slowly wasting away with a hectic fever, died in this sad autumn;[691] but “in the hour of his death the future prosperity of New England and the coming glories of its many churches floated in cheerful visions before his eyes.”[692] Then death struck another shining mark. The Lady Arbella Johnson’s fragile frame, coming “from a paradise of plenty and pleasure into a wilderness of wants,”[693] succumbed shortly to the dread epidemic,[694] to the infinite sorrow of her loving friends. Her death broke the heart of her devoted husband. His sorrow was too full for utterance; or he might have hymned it in that verse of Dr. Watts, so pregnant with tenderness and pathos: “I was all love, and she was all delight; Let me run back to seasons past; Ah! flowery days when first she charmed my sight,— But roses will not always last.” Isaac Johnson survived the beautiful victim but a few weeks,[695] then he followed her to immortality through the grave. “He tried To live without her, liked it not, and died,” said Mather, quaintly.[696] Winthrop, through his tears, wrote his assistant’s epitaph: “He was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace.”[697] And now the mortality was fearful. Eighty of Endicott’s colonists had been buried ere the coming of Winthrop;[698] in the summer and autumn succeeding his arrival over two hundred died.[699] Death reaped its hecatombs and battened on corpses. The Pilgrims wailed out their grief in God’s ear, and kept fasts and appointed days of humiliation. But He “who doeth all things well” had his own purpose to subserve, and his hand was not stayed from smiting till the chill December skies mantled the earth with snow.[700] Early in September the colonists determined to desert the pestilential river banks; a few went back to Salem, some paused at Charleston; others, led by Winthrop, planted themselves on that neck of land which is now called Boston.[701]