The early struggles of the Plymouth planters and the hardships they endured form a story of terrible privation and suffering on the one hand and heroic endurance and self-sacrifice on the other. They were late in arriving, and the season, midwinter, was unpropitious. The weather was unusually severe, even for that rigorous climate, and the Pilgrims found themselves in sorry plight on that bleak New England shore. Cold and famine had doggedly to be fought, and the contest was an unequal one. Cooped up for so long in the Mayflower, and badly fed and sheltered on the voyage, the settlers were ill-fitted to withstand the stress of the new conditions. For a time it was a struggle for bare existence, and the little colony was brought very near to extinction. The first care was to provide accommodation ashore, and for economy of building the community was divided into nineteen households, and the single men assigned to the different families, each of whom was to erect its own habitation and to have a plot of land. These rude homesteads of wood and thatch, and other buildings, eventually formed a single street beside the stream running down to the beach from the hill beyond. The soil of the chosen settlement appeared to be good, and abounded with "delicate springs" of water; the land yielded plentifully in season, and life teemed upon the coast and in the sea. [Illustration: _Copyright, 1906, by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth_ THE CANOPY OVER PLYMOUTH ROCK] But many of the Pilgrims never lived to enjoy this provision of a bountiful Providence. Worn out, enfeebled in health, insufficiently housed ashore, they were a prey to sickness. Death reaped a rich harvest in their midst. Every second day a grave had to be dug for one or other of them in the frozen ground. Sometimes, during January and February, two or three died in a single day. So rapid was the mortality that at last only a mere handful remained who were able to look after the sick. William Bradford was at this time prostrated, and it is pathetic to note the expression of his gratitude to his friend William Brewster and Miles Standish and others who ministered to his needs and those of the fellow-sufferers around him. One house, the first finished, was set apart as a hospital. The hill above the beach was converted into a burial-ground,[6] and one is touched to the quick to read of the graves having to be levelled and grassed over for fear the prowling Indians should discover how few and weak the strangers were becoming!