AN OLD-TIME THANKSGIVING
BY M. ELOISE TALBOT
LITTLE PRUDENCE stood by the window, with her face pressed hard against it. She was not looking out; she could not do that, for the window-frame, instead of being filled with clear panes of glass, had oiled paper stretched tightly across it.
It was a very curious window, indeed, and it transmitted a dull light into a very curious room. The floor was of uncovered boards; the walls were built of logs of wood with the bark still clinging to them in places, and overhead were great rafters from which hung suspended many things—swords and corselets, coats, bundles of dried herbs, pots and pans.
The furniture was very simple. In the center of the room was a wooden table, scoured to whiteness, stiff-backed chairs were ranged against the wall, and a dresser, where pewter cups and platters stood in shining rows, adorned the farther corner. In a wide chimney-place a royal fire was blazing, and before it stood Prudence's mother, carefully stirring some mixture in an iron pot which hung upon a crane. Within the circle of the firelight, which played upon her yellow hair and turned it to ruddy gold, Mehitable, Prudence's sister, stepped rapidly to and fro, her spinning-wheel making a humming accompaniment to the crackling of the blaze.
Prudence turned to watch her, pushing farther back a little white cap which pressed upon her short curls; for she was a little Puritan maiden, living in the town of Plymouth, and it was not the present year of our Lord, but about two hundred and eighty-four years ago. She was a very different Prudence from what she would have been if she had been living now, and it was a very different Plymouth from the pleasant town we know to-day, with its many houses climbing up the hill, and the busy people in its streets. There were only seven houses then, and they stood in one line leading to the water, and there was but one building besides—a square wooden affair with palisades, which served as a church on Sundays, a fort when enemies were feared, and a storehouse all the time. Beyond these nothing could be seen but woods—trackless, unknown forests—and, away to the east, the ocean, where the waves were booming with a lonesome sound.
It was not quite a year before that Prudence's father had stood with the other brave colonists on the deck of the Mayflower, and had looked with eager eyes upon the shore of the New World. This first year in Massachusetts had on the whole been a happy one for Prudence. During the cold winter which followed their landing, she had indeed cast longing thoughts toward the home in Holland which they had left; and especially did she long for the Dutch home when she was hungry, and the provisions which had been brought on the ship were scanty; but she had forgotten all such longings in the bounty given by the summer, and now it seemed to her there was no more beautiful place in the world than this New England.
It was Prudence's father who opened the door and came in, carrying on his shoulder an ax with which he had been felling trees for the winter's fuel. Prudence never could get over the queer feeling it gave her to see her father thus employed. When they lived in Holland, he was always writing and studying in books of many languages, but here he did little else than work in the fields, for it was only so that the early settlers obtained their daily bread. He leaned his ax in a corner, and came toward the fire, rubbing his hands to get out the cold.