[466] the stockings must be knit, and the weekly mending must be done. To clothe and feed the several laborers, and then to receive and take care of many products of the farm, belonged to the mother and daughter. The toil of the females was as unremitted as the alternation of morning and evening; and no day in the year could bring them a vacation. How much may be said of the part that woman played, or rather worked, in the grand drama of our first settlements! What would our Pilgrim Fathers have been without our Pilgrim Mothers? Shaggy barbarians of the woods. Woman dared to follow where man dared to lead; and she brought with her the humanizing amenities of social life, and the sanctifying power of true religion. She came to this wilderness with a brave heart and a Christian faith, that she might share the perils and brighten the hopes of her husband; and, when here, “she looked well to the ways of her household, and ate not the bread of idleness.” Man may be said to have the calloused hand, the sinewy arm, and the lion soul; but did it not require some courage in the mother to stay at home all day alone in the log-hut, when the bears and wolves and Indians might be nearer to her than her protector? The patient moral force of Christian woman cannot be over-stated; and our Pilgrim Mothers have never been over-praised. Their coming here emancipated them. Escaping from the duress of semi-feudal caste in Europe, they sprang upward to their natural place,--the equal and companion of man. Nowhere had the like of this been seen in the world before; and nowhere else is now to be seen this new type of woman. These missionaries of Heaven's love shaped the character and the happy and holy homes of New England; and these homes were the primal causes of our country's intelligence and virtue, which, in their turn, became the causes of our present prosperity and ultimate independence. A man honors himself when he honors his mother,--a mother who lived on earth as if she were living in heaven,--that mother
Whom God created in a smile of grace,We have seen how the farmer's family, in the log-hut on the banks of the Mystic, passed their Saturday: let us now see what they do on the following Sunday. The only manual labor allowed was that of imperious necessity: any thing further was thought to violate the jealous sanctity of the
And left the smile that made her in her face.
