CHAPTER IV.

ELDER BREWSTER’S CHRISTMAS SERMON.

Sunday morning found the little company gathered once more on the ship, with nothing to do but rest and remember their homes, temporal and spiritual—­homes backward, in old England, and forward, in Heaven.  They were, every man and woman of them, English to the back-bone.  From Captain Jones who commanded the ship to Elder Brewster who ruled and guided in spiritual affairs, all alike were of that stock and breeding which made the Englishman of the days of Bacon and Shakespeare, and in those days Christmas was knit into the heart of every one of them by a thousand threads, which no after years could untie.

Christmas carols had been sung to them by nurses and mothers and grandmothers; the Christmas holly spoke to them from every berry and prickly leaf, full of dearest household memories.  Some of them had been men of substance among the English gentry, and in their prosperous days had held high festival in ancestral halls in the season of good cheer.  Elder Brewster himself had been a rising young diplomat in the court of Elizabeth, in the days when the Lord Keeper of the Seals led the revels of Christmas as Lord of Misrule.

So that, though this Sunday morning arose gray and lowering, with snow-flakes hovering through the air, there was Christmas in the thoughts of every man and woman among them—­albeit it was the Christmas of wanderers and exiles in a wilderness looking back to bright home-fires across stormy waters.

The men had come back from their work on shore with branches of green pine and holly, and the women had, stuck them about the ship, not without tearful thoughts of old home-places, where their childhood fathers and mothers did the same.

Bits and snatches of Christmas carols were floating all around the ship, like land-birds blown far out to sea.  In the forecastle Master Coppin was singing: 

“Come, bring with a noise,
 My merry boys,
   The Christmas log to the firing;
 While my good dame, she
 Bids ye all be free,
   And drink to your hearts’ desiring. 
 Drink now the strong beer,
 Cut the white loaf here. 
   The while the meat is shredding
 For the rare minced pie,
 And the plums stand by
   To fill the paste that’s a-kneading.”

“Ah, well-a-day, Master Jones, it is dull cheer to sing Christmas songs here in the woods, with only the owls and the bears for choristers.  I wish I could hear the bells of merry England once more.”

And down in the cabin Rose Standish was hushing little Peregrine, the first American-born baby, with a Christmas lullaby: 

“This winter’s night
I saw a sight—­
  A star as bright as day;
And ever among
A maiden sung,
  Lullay, by-by, lullay!

“This lovely laydie sat and sung,
  And to her child she said,
My son, my brother, and my father dear,
  Why lyest thou thus in hayd? 
My sweet bird,
Tho’ it betide
  Thou be not king veray;
But nevertheless
I will not cease
  To sing, by-by, lullay!