Three days later the shores of the harbour echoed to the ring of axes, the sound of hammers, as the first house was begun, the community house, destined to shelter many families and to store their goods. "Merry Christmas, Father!" said Constance, coming up to her father in the cold of the early bleak December morning. "S-s-sh!" warned her father, finger upon lip. "Do you not know, my daughter, that the keeping of Christmas is abjured by us as savouring of popery, and that to wish one merry at yuletide would be reckoned as unrighteousness among us?" "Ah, but Father, you do not think so! You do not go with all these opinions, and can it be wrong to be merry on the day that gladdened the world?" Constance pleaded. "Not wrong, but praiseworthy, to be merry under our present condition, to my way of thinking," said Stephen Hopkins, glancing around at the drab emptiness of land and sky and harbour beyond. "Nay, child, I do not think it wrong to rejoice at Christmas, nor do I hold with the severity of most of our people, but because I believe that it will be good to begin anew in a land that is not oppressed, nor torn by king-made wars and sins, I have cast my lot, as has Myles Standish, who is of one mind with me, among this Plymouth band, and we must conform to custom. So wish me Merry Christmas, if you will, but let none hear you, and we will keep our heresies to ourselves." "Yet the first house in the New World is begun to-day!" laughed Constance. "We are getting a Christmas gift." "A happy portent to begin our common home on the day when the Prince of Peace came to dwell on earth! Let us hope it will bring us peace," said her father. "Peace!" cried Constance, with a swift and terrified remembrance of the accusation which her stepmother had threatened bringing against herself and Giles. CHAPTER V The New Year in the New Land The new year came in bringing with it a driving storm from the Atlantic. The hoary pines threw up their rugged branches as if appealing to the heavens for mercy on the women and little children without shelter on the desolate coast. But the gray heavens did not relent; they poured snow and sleet down upon the infant colony, coating the creaking pines with ice that bent them low, and checked their intercession. As fast as willing hands could work, taking it in continuous shifts by night as well as day, the community house went up. But the storm was upon the colonists before the shelter was ready for them, and even when the roof covered them, the cold laughed it to scorn, entering to wreak its will upon them. Sickness seized one after another of the pilgrim band, men and women alike, and the little children fought croup and pneumonia, nursed by women hardly more fit for the task than were the little victims.