Then Mistress Standish taught the little girl one verse after another of the sweet old carol, and it was not long before Remember could say it all.
The next day was dull and cold, and on Monday, the twenty-fifth, the sky was still overcast. There was no bright Yule log in the Mayflower, and no holly trimmed the little cabin.
The Pilgrims were true to the faith they loved. They held no special service. They made no gifts.
Instead, they went again to the work of cutting the trees, and no one murmured at his hard lot.
"We went on shore," one man wrote in his diary, "some to fell timber, some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry; so no man rested all that day."
As for little Remember, she spent the day on board the Mayflower. She heard no one speak of England or sigh for the English home across the sea. But she did not forget Mistress Brewster's story; and more than once that day, as she was playing by herself, she fancied that she was in front of some English home, helping the English children sing their Christmas songs. And both Mistress Allerton and Mistress Standish, whom God was soon to call away from their earthly home, felt happier and stronger as they heard the little girl singing:
He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox's stall.