PLYMOUTH, Mass. — So you think you've got it rough, what with your manicurist on vacation and your microwave oven on the blink.

At Plimoth Plantation near Cape Cod, Elizabeth Hopkins is one of only four women who survived the pilgrims' first winter. She patiently explains to a tourist that she'd rather be home in London than in Massachusetts in the year 1627. Unfortunately, she had no choice in the matter.

"I do what my husband wills, and he did wish to come here," she says. "Since I am his wife, I am to be at his side, to bear him many children, to cook for him and to serve him. My life is difficult. I work from before the sunrise to after sunset. I am so happy to have the Sunday, for it is illegal to work on that day."

Of course, she is speaking from the past, although it certainly looks like the present. And in the sunshine, surrounded by the wooden houses and clucking chickens of the pilgrim settlement called Plimoth Plantation, the visitor can imagine that time has changed direction, that the people dressed in Puritan garb, speaking in British-flavored dialects and carrying out the tasks of the 17th-Century farmer, are the reality and that the 1989 visitor is the fantasy.

When Hopkins needs butter, she is saying, she must order it from England. Delivery takes four to six weeks.

Before baking a loaf of bread for her family, Hopkins explains, she must first make the beer from which she gleans leavening to use in the baking. She also must grind the grain by hand to make flour.

"I care for it not," Hopkins says of her New England life. Little wonder.

Walking, Talking Museum

Known in 1989 as Troy Creane, Hopkins is among the 180 or so characters inhabiting this walking, talking museum who portray known residents of the colony settled in 1620 by pilgrims who landed on the Mayflower.

Dressed in period clothing, they pursue the daily tasks of 17th-Century life, engaging visitors in discussions while fashioning candles, baking bread, tilling small gardens or milking a goat. The characters are based on the lives of real settlers, and speak in accordance with history, as it is known.

The plantation is a working replica of the settlement. Baby chickens toddle across a yard, bumping into a resting goat, housewives weave cloth while their husbands split logs to burn in fireplaces that provide heat for warmth and cooking, as well as illumination for the night.