Heartily sick of Indian entertainment, in the gray dawn of the following day they set out for Plymouth. The chief was sorry and ashamed that he had been able to receive them in no better style; but while friendship was in his heart, abundance was not in his cabin.[226] After a dismal and stormy jaunt, they reached the welcome settlement on the fifth day of their absence. Hard and uncouth as it was, after their recent experience, it seemed to them an elysium. So severe had been the hardships incident to their mission, so faint and giddy were they from hunger and want of sleep and over-exertion, that several days’ repose was required to recruit them back to health and strength.[227] In the course of the excursion just happily ended, the Pilgrims had acquired considerable knowledge of their Indian neighbors—of their habits, their motives of action, their social forms. They saw that rivalry, and enmity begotten of rivalry, stirred constant feuds among the tribes by whom they were surrounded. The sight of a strange Indian never failed to fill their dusky guides with alarm and watchfulness; among the red men, in the most literal sense, “eternal vigilance” was “the price of liberty.”[228] The first settlers of Plymouth generally dealt honorably and amicably with their Indian allies, more so than the later colonists of New England, as the treaty with Massasoit, unbroken for fifty years, amply proves. Trade was of course an object with them; but it was not selfishly paramount. This fair dealing begot in its turn corresponding friendship and good feeling among the red men; it put kindliness into their hearts at a time when a revengeful temper might have led them to combine and sweep the feeble handful of usurping interlopers, weakened by disease and decimated by death, into the Atlantic on whose verge they stood. We can never be sufficiently thankful that God moved both colonists and savages to cement so long and fair a peace. Yet from the very outset the Indian recognized the superiority of the white man; he made a reluctant yet irrepressible obeisance to civilization. Dryden has well expressed this innate consciousness: “Old prophecies foretell our fall at hand, When bearded men in floating castles land.” The sagamore, as he gazed on the Plymouth settlement, stood grief-stricken to think that his lease of ages of the forests approached its end. He seemed to see in the recent plague a grant of the land to another race, engrossed by the hand of the Great Spirit himself. That rifled burial-mound of the Wampanoags, in which the Pilgrims found their seed-corn, was typical; it was the new tenant entering upon the estate, taking possession in the name of God, and for the common good. Yet