“Put on your sleeves and your cape, Lora. You’ll get burned else.”
“Yes, mother,” replied the girl patiently, and passing into her own bedroom returned presently with a cape covering her bare neck, and buttoning some loose sleeves to her shoulders, for in that day a gown with high neck and long sleeves was a vestment unknown, and when age or cold weather or out-of-door excursions demanded a covering for shoulders and arms it was supplied, as in Lora’s case, by temporary expedients. A little white linen hood tied under the chin completed the girl’s preparation, and with a gentle kiss upon her mother’s cheek she joined Betty impatiently waiting upon the doorstep.
“Lora, I should think it would weary you to be such a cosset!” cried she, as the girls struck into a path leading northward through the captain’s lands to Eagle’s Creek, where hard by a clump of aged oaks stood the cottage where in the summer season Elder Brewster lived with his sons Love and Wrestling and the young wife of the former. Still trending north, the path led past Jonathan Brewster’s comfortable cottage near the Eagle’s Tree to Harden Hill, where a little way from the edge of the bluff stood a small and low building rudely put together of rough timber and hewn planks, with a thatched roof and windows of oiled cloth, and neither foundations nor chimney, the former unneeded because the colonists hoped at no distant day to replace this their one public edifice with something more elaborate and permanent, and the latter undreamed of as yet even in the mother-church of Plymouth, where the Rev. John Rayner and his colleague Charles Chauncey, both graduates of Cambridge, England, and bred in such luxury as England then knew, took turns in preaching, in overcoats and woolen gloves, sermons of two hours’ duration to a congregation the weaklings of which kept themselves alive by the use of foot-stoves and hot bricks in their laps, while the stronger members grimly endured sitting three and four hours in an atmosphere considerably more chill than the outdoor winter air.
Following this example, Duxbury built no chimneys to her first meeting-houses, and Elder Brewster in the beginning, with Ralph Partridge and John Holmes to succeed him, preached and prayed with only the fire of their own zeal to keep them warm.
A little way from the meeting-house stood a cottage owned by William Bassett, but at present occupied by the Rev. Mr. Partridge, who waited for his formal installation as pastor of the new-formed town before settling himself in a house of his own, and still lingered in The Nook, although he had already bought of William Latham a house whose magnificence has descended upon the pages of history for our admiring contemplation; a house, and not a cottage, for it boasted a second story with a garret overhead, and a roof sweeping majestically in the rear, from the roof-tree to the ground.
But the Partridges had not yet removed to their new nest, and it was in the vicinity of the little hired cottage on Harden Hill that Betty and Lora found their friend Bessie demurely watering and turning a web of fine linen laid to bleach upon the grass. As they approached she started and turned round, a rosy, sonsy lassie, plump as her name, and overflowing with health and spirits.
“Oh, Bess, is it true?” began Betty, laying a hand upon each of her friend’s shoulders and scrutinizing her face with its flaming blushes.
“Good-even, Betty, good-even, Lora! Is what true? What does she mean, Lora? Let me finish wetting my linen, you runagate!”
“Your linen! Aha! How many smocks and petticoats will it make? Or is it for sheets and pillowbers? And must we all come and help you sew it, or is there time a plenty?”