But if the winter was hard and starvation stared them in the face and sickness was rife in Plymouth the Pilgrims worked on, confident that they were doing the will of God. This was the spirit of young as well as of old, and the thought that must often have cheered Priscilla as she looked from the door of the rude log-cabin over leagues of snow to a lowering sky. But there were bright hours even in that first winter. Sometimes Captain Standish or John Alden or others of the men would bring logs of red cedar from the near-by forest to the Mullins cottage and pile them on the hearth. Then they would have a great fire and all the family would gather round it, and neighbors, seeing the smoke, would come through the path cut in the deep snow to the Mullins door and join in the warmth and the stories at the hearth. Many a day Priscilla and Mary spent at the spinning-wheel, talking of old play-mates in England while their feet kept the wheels going and the carded wool piled up about them on the floor. At other times, when the weather was clearer, they would go down to the beach and walk its length until they came to a great rock. There they would sit and talk of what they would do when summer came and the sea should be calm and the woods full of wild flowers. Sometimes they would sing, for both girls had good voices, sending the words of the old hymns of the Pilgrims far out across the breakers. Slowly the winter passed and Priscilla had her first taste of spring in New England. Hope sprang up fresh in the hearts of these Pilgrims as they saw the snows melt and the days grow longer. They began to build bigger and stronger houses and to prepare the fields for crops. Whenever they could be spared from home Priscilla and Mary and the few other girls in the village went out to the woods. There the trees were putting forth their buds, and one day they came upon a fragrant rose-colored flower which they had never seen before and which they named the Mayflower. Soon the woods were full of them, and the girls gathered armfuls to take back to their log homes. Beyond the circle of green woods they found many ponds and on their banks another white and red flower called the azalea, and in the water were wide lily pads and still farther beyond bushes of the soft snowy pink-hued laurel. In the evenings they would climb to the hill back of Plymouth and, seated there, look over the tiny gathering of houses to the open bay where the light high up in the rigging of the _Mayflower_ shone like a planet low down in the sky. There they would talk of England, and of how by this time the hawthorne must be in bloom and the hedgerows all in blossom and the small stone churches mantled in ivy and the lark singing as he soared above the tower. But although they talked much about England, they were already very fond of their new home, and when they heard that the _Mayflower_ was to sail back to England they did not say that they would like to sail on her.