tensive marshes occupying 5,000 acres or more along its eastern borders.
   Owing to a great plague visiting the Aborigines on our coast a short time before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, the Indian population, which had been quite large, was greatly reduced by the scourge, so that when our forefathers landed, there were but few natives to oppose them if they had so desired, which notwithstanding the general opinion that they did, the record of that period fails to prove.   In the early days of the Pilgrims' existence on our coast, the Indians, for the most part, were hospitable, showing no signs of hostility, and acting with kindness and gentleness, which the Pilgrims reciprocated.   A few hostile Indians, as with a few hostile whites of to-day, worried their neighbors.   Our forefathers did not rob the poor Indians of their lands, as currently reported among our people from time immemorial, but paid for them, not large amounts to be sure, but satisfactory prices to the Indian nevertheless, in corn, blankets and trinkets.   Our forefathers in Marshfield found the ground already tilled when they settled here.   The Indians cultivated corn, one of the greatest products of to-day, the 20th century.   Into a hill of corn they put a couple of alewives, or other fish, and thus gave us of the 20th century a hint in the growth of this staple article; hence the Indian was the earliest user of commercial fertilizers.   At the time of John Smith's voyage along our coast, years before the advent of the Pilgrims, he saw large and thrifty fields of corn grown by the "poor" Indian.   The country in Marshfield and thereabouts, except on the marshes, was covered with a large growth of trees, chestnut, hickory, oak, maple, pine, also the hazelnut, beechnut, butternut, and shagbark.   It was indeed pleasant for our forefathers to locate in a region where the strawberry, the raspberry, the blackberry, the huckleberry and the cranberry grew in abundance, and then they were delighted to find in their midst the mountain