swung long iron bars in the chimney to hang cooking pots over the fire. Everything was carried from the ship into the houses. Then the Mayflower sailed away home. The little pale faces were alone in the wide, wide, New World of America, with the red children of the forest.
They had a great deal to show each other. The Indians brought corn and told the white people how to make mush and hominy. They brought maple sugar to make syrup. They had very small grains of corn that burst into flowers when they got hot. Wasn't pop-corn a surprise? Faithful and her brother got fur hoods and mittens. They coasted on hillsides and ran on snow-shoes. They had baked Indian beans and pumpkin pudding to eat, and wild turkey with cranberries. In the summer they found wild grapes, plums and crabapples, strawberries, blackberries and blueberries. In the fall there were nuts of many kinds. They gathered wax bayberries to make sweet smelling candles. The carpenters made boats to fish for big cod. The children dug clams from the sand on the beach.
How cosy it was, in the log home in the evening! Half a tree could be put into the fireplace. The children ate their supper of hominy and syrup and deer meat from Indian bowls of wood. But they had white linen cloths and napkins. They brought their manners and their prayers and their school books to America. A woman taught them to read and write and spell and "cipher," in one of the cabins. To "cipher" is to do arithmetic sums by hard rules. They learned their letters from a horn book. The horn book was more like a slate than a book. Their only reader was the Bible. Faithful read the Bible through three times, before she was twelve years old. Besides she helped her mother. In America she had to learn to sweep a room clean with an Indian birch broom, and to brush the hearth with a turkey wing. She spun flax and wove cloth. She made soap by boiling lye water, dripped through wood ashes, and animal fat together. This made strong, brown soft soap.
Her brother went into the woods with his father to cut down trees. The forest land had to be cleared for fields, to grow corn and wheat and flax. Around every cabin was a little garden to grow peas and cabbages and flowers. Oh, how the children watched the first green sprouts come up. And how they clapped their hands when they saw the first English daisy or pink rose. The flowers made America seem more like a real home. In the fields and woods
