And there are choristers a-plenty: the remote sweet piping of hylas piercing the velvet darkness of a night in spring, the melodious booming of bull-frogs, the challenge of Bob White; and all the dear homely New England birds, twittering, chirping, chattering, pouring out their hearts in song as they swing with the trees that the wind sweeps into endless motion. And in summer and winter, from north, south, east, or west, the wind brings us news from the sea: the savor of salt, gray billows of cloud and fog, clear stark bright days following one another through a season. The southwest gales of summer beat down ripe grasses in the field and feather willow and poplar with silver; the great autumn gales go trumpeting through the land; the nor’easter sends surf thundering on the outer shore; and there are the soft moist winds that relax the high-wrought tension of humans, and melt the rigors of winter.
The free winds,—and contour, sound, color: with nothing superfluous, yet satisfying and ever present. And from flowers and fruit and woodland and the sharp tang of the sea there is distilled a draught corrective of morbid humors and the wandering will,—a stanch pledge of sobriety.
CHAPTER II
THE OLD COLONY
I
It is a welcoming country, and easily enough some of the Pilgrims, after they had established their settlement at Plymouth, returned to the sandy shores, the woods and meadows that had first offered them the possibility of home. They must have had a peculiar sentiment for the place: for here began their adventure in the great free country of the wilderness, and the chronicles of Bradford and Winslow show an ingenuous pleasure in the recital of it. They were for the most part yeomen and farmers, exiles from the pretty valley of the Trent, who for some eleven years had lived restricted in small Dutch cities; and for sixty-seven days all of them, yeomen and artisans, men, women, and children, many more than the Mayflower could well accommodate, had been buffetted about the Atlantic by autumn gales. Driven out of their calculated course to the southward, they made their landfall at Cape Cod, “the which being certainly known to be it,” no wonder that they were “not a little joyful.” “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land,” writes William Bradford, “they fell upon their knees and blessed ye God of Heaven, who had brought them over ye vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.”
Nor was it a country unknown to them. Since Cabot’s voyage of discovery more than a hundred years earlier, the whole coast from Cape Breton to the Hudson had been increasingly visited by French and English seamen who were attracted chiefly by the rich fishing-grounds. It is even said that the great Drake was the first Englishman to set foot in New England, and that it was upon Cape Cod he landed. There are stories of ancient adventurers voyaging, as it might be, to the rhythm of Masefield’s Galley-Rowers:
“... bound sunset-wards, not knowing,
Over the whale’s way miles and miles,
Going to Vine-Land, haply going
To the Bright Beach of the Blessed Isles.