Category: Historical Novels

A Pilgrim Maid: A Story of Plymouth Colony in 1620

A young girl, brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a sweet seriousness that was neither joy nor sorrow upon her fair pale face, leaned against the mast on the _Mayflower's_ deck watching the bustle of the final preparations for setting sail westward.

Chapters

20. CHAPTER XX

Toward Giles she held herself kindly, yet never showed him affection. But toward Constance her manner was what might be called eagerly affectionate, as if she so longed to prove...

19. CHAPTER XIX

As the winter wore away, that second winter in Plymouth colony that proved so hard to endure, the new state of things in the Hopkins household continued. Constance could not und...

15. CHAPTER XV

It was Francis Billington's shrill boyish voice that aroused the Hopkins household with this tidings, early in the morning on one of those mid-November days when at that hour th...

16. CHAPTER XVI

There was a gray sky the day after young madcap John Billington was laid to rest in the grave that had been hard to think of as meant for him, dug by the younger colonists. Long...

18. CHAPTER XVIII

Little Damaris, who had so nearly made the last great pilgrimage upon which we must all go, having turned her face once more toward the world she had been quitting, resumed her...

14. CHAPTER XIV

Constance Hopkins sat at the side of the cave-like fireplace; opposite to where her father, engrossed in a heavy, much-rubbed, leather-bound book, toasted his feet beside the fi...

12. CHAPTER XII

A gray evening of mist drifting in from the sea settled down upon Plymouth. It emphasized the silence and seemed to widen and deepen the vacuum created by the absence of Giles a...

10. CHAPTER X

The girls of the plantation were gathered together in Stephen Hopkins's house. The logs on the hearth were ash-strewn to check their burning yet to hold them ready to burn when...

17. CHAPTER XVII

Giles took a new place in Plymouth after his embassy to the Narragansetts. No longer a boy among his fellow pilgrims, he fulfilled well and busily the offices that were his as o...

5. CHAPTER V

The new year came in bringing with it a driving storm from the Atlantic. The hoary pines threw up their rugged branches as if appealing to the heavens for mercy on the women and...

13. CHAPTER XIII

Hurt and angry, Giles would not bend his stiff young neck to humble himself, checking any impulse to do so by reminding himself that his father had been unjust to him.

2. CHAPTER II

The wind held fair, the golden September weather waited on each new day at its rising and sent it at its close, radiantly splendid, into the sea ahead of the _Mayflower_ as she...

4. CHAPTER IV

Constance had a tender conscience, quick to self-blame. She was unhappy if she could impute to herself a fault, ill at ease till she had done all that she could to repair wrong....

11. CHAPTER XI

"No, Father, but he must be with the other lads. Perhaps they are serving up some merry trick for the wedding. Nothing can have befallen him. Giles was the happiest lad yesterda...

8. CHAPTER VIII

Constance invented a question that must be asked Elder Brewster because she knew that the girls, though they revered him, feared him, and never willingly went where they must re...

3. CHAPTER III

"Call Giles hither. I need help to strap these blankets to carry safely, Mr. Hopkins," said Dame Eliza Hopkins, bustling up to her husband two hours after the _Mayflower_ had ma...

6. CHAPTER VI

Constance turned away from the boys feeling that, till the trouble hanging over Giles was settled, waking or sleeping she could think of nothing else. When she reached the commu...

7. CHAPTER VII

He was not lazy, but he was adventuresome, and steady employment held for him no attraction. Since Captain Standish and the others in authority would deal with him if he tried t...

9. CHAPTER IX

Giles Hopkins and John and Francis Billington slept in the new house, now nearly finished, on Leyden Street. Therefore it happened that Stephen Hopkins did not see his son until...

1. CHAPTER I

A young girl, brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a sweet seriousness that was neither joy nor sorrow upon her fair pale face, leaned against the mast on the _Mayflower's_ deck watchi...