The last month of the year had come before they could decide where
the fortified town, made necessary by Indian hostilities, should
be located. The Governor's house had been partly framed at
Charlestown, but with the removal to Boston it was taken down, and
finally Cambridge was settled upon as the most desirable point,
and their first winter was spent there. Here for the first time it
was possible for Anne Bradstreet to unpack their household
belongings, and seek to create some semblance of the forsaken
home. But even for the Dudleys, among the richest members of the
party there was a privation which shows how sharply it must have
fared with the poorer portion, and Dudley wrote, nine months after
their arrival, that he "thought fit to commit to memory our
present condition, and what hath befallen us since our arrival
here; which I will do shortly, after my usual manner, and must do
rudely, having yet no table, nor other room to write in than by
the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my
family must have leave to resort, though they break good manners,
and make me many times forget what I would say, and say what I
would not."

No word of Mistress Dudley's remains to tell the shifts and
strivings for comfort in that miserable winter which, mild as it
was, had a keenness they were ill prepared to face. Petty miseries
and deprivations, the least endurable of all forms of suffering,
surrounded them like a cloud of stinging insects, whose attacks,
however intolerable at the moment, are forgotten with the passing,
and either for this reason, or from deliberate purpose, there is
not a line of reference to them in any of Anne Bradstreet's
writings. Scarcity of food was the sorest trouble. The Charlestown