The influence of the women of the colonists was doubtless great in maintaining the courage and constancy of the men; but, as was the case with the early settlers in Virginia, we have little or no particular record of the feminine portion of the settlement. We are told of Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem, _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, and we are entirely at liberty to account her a real personage if we desire to do so. It is at least certain that Miles Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was one of the Pilgrim Fathers--whether the latter _in esse_ or _in futuro_ we are not told, though knowledge on this point might have bearing upon the authenticity of the story of Priscilla and if the rest of the legend is not true it is at least well imagined. Moreover, it may be asserted that it is true in the deeper sense of truth, whether or not it be loyal to mere fact. The picture drawn for us of the Puritan maiden is typically true and therefore worthy of quotation even in a volume dedicated to the Muse of history rather than to her of poesy:
"Ever of her he thought, when he read in his Bible on Sunday Praise of the virtuous woman, as she is described in the Proverbs-- How the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her always, How all the days of her life she will do him good and not evil, How she seeketh the wool and the flax and worketh with gladness, How she layeth her hand to the spindle and holdeth the distaff, How she is not afraid of the snow for herself or her household, Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving."
For they were no idle butterflies of fashion, no languid great dames, these wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. Their hands knew the rush of the thread on the wheel, the touch of the distaff, and were even not unacquainted at need with the weight of musket and bird-gun. They were cast to some extent in the fine old Spartan mould, these Pilgrim mothers; they feared God--and nothing else--and they bent their energies to the performance of their sole aspiration, that of "doing their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them." It was a state of life that held peril and toil and little reward for these things; but they cared nothing for this, these splendid pilgrim dames, but lived their lives bravely and died with the consciousness that they had done their best to make noble the birth of a new land which should shelter their children forever.