was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John
Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was one of
the Pilgrim Fathers--whether the latter _in esse_ or _in futuro_ we are
not told, though knowledge on this point might have bearing upon the
authenticity of the story of Priscilla and if the rest of the legend is
not true it is at least well imagined. Moreover, it may be asserted that
it is true in the deeper sense of truth, whether or not it be loyal to
mere fact. The picture drawn for us of the Puritan maiden is typically
true and therefore worthy of quotation even in a volume dedicated to the
Muse of history rather than to her of poesy:

"Ever of her he thought, when he read in his Bible on Sunday
Praise of the virtuous woman, as she is described in the Proverbs--
How the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her always,
How all the days of her life she will do him good and not evil,
How she seeketh the wool and the flax and worketh with gladness,
How she layeth her hand to the spindle and holdeth the distaff,
How she is not afraid of the snow for herself or her household,
Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving."

For they were no idle butterflies of fashion, no languid great dames,
these wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. Their hands knew the rush of
the thread on the wheel, the touch of the distaff, and were even not
unacquainted at need with the weight of musket and bird-gun. They were
cast to some extent in the fine old Spartan mould, these Pilgrim
mothers; they feared God--and nothing else--and they bent their energies
to the performance of their sole aspiration, that of "doing their duty
in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them." It was
a state of life that held peril and toil and little reward for these
things; but they cared nothing for this, these splendid pilgrim dames,
but lived their lives bravely and died with the consciousness that they
had done their best to make noble the birth of a new land which should
shelter their children forever.

The first authentic record that we have of an individual woman in the
time of the first northern settlement comes to us in the shape of a
death, as the first feminine name of the Roanoke settlers came to us
connected with a birth. It was in 1630, when the settlement of
Massachusetts Bay had begun to take some aspect of permanency, that
there came into its