of late years.

For the rest, we must regard these mothers of the country in the mass
rather than as individuals; and this is in accord with their true
natures. They were not given to "brawling in the streets" or to
"contention upon the housetops," these women of the old Puritans; they
did their duties in their household and left the management of the
weightier affairs of the young colony to the men. Yet they guided these
same men in ways which they hardly knew; and they were in all ways
fitted to be the mothers of the nation which was even then beginning to
stretch its infant arms in growing strength. They were grave, decorous,
and terribly strong, those wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. They
took upon themselves the cares of the household, and these were not
slight in those days when all provision must be garnered by the sweat of
the eater's brow. There were then no shops to which one might send in
search of luxuries or even necessities; the Puritan woman usually
brought with her on her ship some store of household goods, some chests
of clothing, some plate perhaps to furnish forth her table; for all the
rest she depended upon the energy and skill of her husband, the work of
her own hands, and the blessing of that God to worship whom in freedom
she and hers had sought the wilderness as their home. And the spirit of
that wilderness entered into her as she dwelt in its boundaries; she
drew from its breast some of its quiet and strength and truth, even as
the aborigines had imbibed these qualities in their long communion with
nature at her best. There was to come a time, and that right soon, when
the reclamation of the wilderness should have so far progressed that
there would be town life, on its borders at least, and the Puritan woman
would lose some of the qualities which had been imparted to her by the
land to which she had come as an alien and where she remained as a
daughter; but until the coming of that time she was true to the
inspiration of the country in which her lot was cast. America was then a
land of mystery; back from the Atlantic stretched miles upon miles of
untrodden, unknown wood and plain and hill and lake and river; and the
power of the unknown was felt over that little strip of coast which
acknowledged though not in entire subjection the control of the white
race. So the Pilgrim Mother had ever the sense of the mysterious, the
unfathomable, pressing upon her, ever ready to whisper new secrets in