Clark’s Island, still covered with its primeval cedars and with its northern headland unwasted and majestic, lay like a bower upon the great field of flowing water, and matched Saquish, still an island, but beginning to throw out tentative arms toward the Gurnet’s Head, where six hundred years before Thorwald, brother of Leif, wounded unto death by the savages, desired to be buried, with a cross at his head and another at his feet, directing that the headland should thenceforth be known as Krossness. Toward these yearned the loving arm thrown out by Manomet toward the Duxbury shore,—that arm now reduced to a barren sandspit, but then a green and fruit-laden peninsula; and within it glittered in the evening light the harbor, deep enough at that day to float not only the Mayflower, but Captain Pierce’s Lyon, which now lay snugly anchored there, while the governor’s barge rowed away toward the town, bearing Bradford and Winslow home with the jolly mariner as their guest. Blue smoke-wreaths floating idly upward from Plymouth cottages told of housewives busy with the evening meal, and upon the crest of Burying Hill a twinkling gleam now and again showed that Lieutenant Holmes did not suffer the brasswork of the colony’s guns to grow dim now that they had come under his care.
But closer at hand than these things stretched the marshes, the beautiful Duxbury marshes with their grasses full grown and ripe, reposing under the sunset light like a fair garden, where great masses of color lay in harmonious contrast, and the heavy heads of seed bent, and rippled, and rustled to the evening breeze, murmuring sweet secrets that he carried straight out to sea and buried there.
O man, man! Lay out your modern gardens, and mass your pelargoniums and calceolarias and begonias and salvias and the rest, in beds of contrasting color, and then, if you would note your improvement upon ancient methods, go in the autumn and look at the marshes of the Old Colony, laid out by Mother Nature before Thorwald selected Krossness first as his chosen home, and then his chosen grave.
So fair, so wonderful, so entrancing, lay the view that evening at the foot of Captain’s Hill, yet Wrestling Brewster, albeit a man of singular delicacy of perception, never saw it; saw nothing, in fact, but the lissome form of a young maid clothed in white samite, with pale golden hair wound around her head and held by quaint silver pins with crystal heads that now and again caught the light and sent it flashing back like the aureole of a saint. The great gray eyes, wide open beneath their level brows, were steadfastly fixed upon some point far out at sea, the vanishing point of earth’s curve, the point where the straightforward look of human eyes glides off the surface of the globe and penetrates the ether beyond. What vision arose before the maiden’s eyes in that dim horizon realm? What thought or what dream parted the soft mouth, and tinged the pure pallor of the cheek? What meant the sigh that just stirred the flower at her throat?
So asked the heart of the young man standing motionless and devout in the edge of the little grove, until with the feeling of one who intrudes upon sacred mysteries he withdrew his gaze, and rustled the twigs of the shrub beside him. The girl turned quickly, and as she met his eyes smiled gently.
“Oh, is it you, Ras? I’m glad you came.”
“Are you, Lora? Are you glad I came? And I am glad that you are glad.”
“’Tis so fair, so heavenly a scene that I would all I love might enjoy it as well as I.”