That such a nature as the fiery Captain’s could not exist without the soothing touch of love, could not brook loneliness, and could not endure grief, but must needs arm himself with forgetfulness and a new love when sorrow came to him in the loss of the old, is of course to be expected. If he were a little precipitate in asking for Priscilla’s affection before Rose had been in her unnamed grave three months, something of the blame is due to the condition of the colony, which made sentimental considerations of less value than practical ones,—an evident fact, when Mr. Winslow almost immediately on the death of his wife married the mother of Peregrine White, not two months a widow, hardly more a mother. Apparently there were not a great many young girls in the little company. The gentle Priscilla Mullins and the high-minded Mary Chilton were the most prominent ones, at any rate. One knows instinctively that it would not be Mary Chilton towards whom the soldier would be drawn,—the daring and spirited girl who must be the first to spring ashore when the boat touched land. It is true that John Alden’s descendants ungallantly declare that he was before her in that act; but no one disputes her claim to be the first woman whose foot touched shore; and that is quite enough for one who loves to think of her and of the noble and serene Ann Hutchinson as the far-away mothers of the loftiest and loveliest soul she ever knew. [Illustration: _The daring and spirited girl_] One can well conjecture Mary Chilton as comforting and supporting Priscilla in the terrors of that voyage, in such storms as that where the little ship, tossed at the waves’ will, lay almost on her beam-ends, and the drowning man who had gone down fathoms deep clutched her topsail-halyards and saved himself; or in calmer moments reading the blessed promises of His word. Young girls willing to undertake that voyage, that enterprise, and whose hearts were already so turned heavenward as the act implied, must have been of a lofty type of thought and nature; they must often have walked the narrow deck, exchanging the confidences of their hopes and dreams. I see them sitting and softly singing hymns together, on the eve of that first Sunday on the new coast, sitting by that fragrant fire of the red cedar which Captain Standish brought back to the ships after the first exploration of the forest. Priscilla might have sung, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and the voice of Rose may have added a note of sweetness to the strain. But that gentle measure would never have expressed the feelings of the Captain, whose God was “a man of war.” If, out of the tunes allowed, there were one that fitted the wild burden,—and unless their annexation to the book of Common Prayer caused the disapproval of “All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternholde, late Grome of the Kinges Majestyes Robes, did in his lyfe-tyme drawe into Englyshe Metre,”—I can feel the zest with which the Captain may have roared out,—