The Myles Standish Monument
As we went out down the lane, we turned to take one more look at John Alden's land. There, in the middle foreground, we saw the artist, sketching busily.
"How did you get here?" we asked in a breath.
"In the car. How did you get here?"
"We walked," said Barbara with emphasis.
"Like to go the rest of the way by stage?" inquired the artist affably, hoisting his sketching kit over his shoulder and pointing to the car at the foot of the lane. "I'm going over to the Standish house next."
"Did you know," said Barbara dreamily to the artist, as she seated herself in the car, "that the four most famous descendants of John Alden and Priscilla were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Tom Thumb?"
"Barbara," said the artist gravely, "did you make that up?"
"No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we went around the corner on one wheel, "I looked it up."
Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against the sky. We went careening up the side-road to the Standish house, which was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but by one of his sons.