The Mayflower at Plymouth

OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS

BY WINTHROP PACKARD

Author of "White Mountain Trails," "Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist," etc.

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1920,

BY WINTHROP PACKARD

PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO., BOSTON

FOREWORD

The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of the Boston Evening Transcript and the Atlantic Monthly for permission to reprint in this volume matter originally contributed to the columns of that paper and magazine; and to A. S. Burbank of Plymouth, I. Chester Horton, and Howard S. Adams for permission to reproduce various illustrations.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

[CHAPTER I OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS]
[CHAPTER II PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS]
[CHAPTER III UNBUILDING A BUILDING]
[CHAPTER IV FOREFATHERS' DAY]
[CHAPTER V THE SINGING PINES]
[CHAPTER VI NANTUCKET IN APRIL]
[CHAPTER VII FOOTING IT ACROSS THE CAPE]
[CHAPTER VIII WILD APPLE TREES]
[CHAPTER IX MIDSUMMER MOONLIGHT]
[CHAPTER X TURTLE-HEAD AND JEWEL-WEED]
[CHAPTER XI THE WAY OF A WOODCHUCK]
[CHAPTER XII ALONG THE SALT MARSHES]
[CHAPTER XIII FISHING "DOWN OUTSIDE"]
[CHAPTER XIV VOICES OF THE BROOKSIDE]
[CHAPTER XV GHOSTS OF THE NORTHEASTER]
[CHAPTER XVI JOTHAM STORIES]
[CHAPTER XVII GOOD-BYE TO SUMMER]
[CHAPTER XVIII MYSTICAL PASTURES]
[CHAPTER XIX WHITE PINE GROVES]
[CHAPTER XX THE PASTURE IN NOVEMBER]
[CHAPTER XXI RED CEDAR LORE]
[CHAPTER XXII AUNT SUE'S SNOWBANK]
[CHAPTER XXIII SPORTS OF THE WINTER WOODS]
[CHAPTER XXIV COASTING ON PONKAPOAG]
[CHAPTER XXV PICKEREL FISHING]
[CHAPTER XXVI YULE FIRES]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[THE MAYFLOWER AT PLYMOUTH]
[THE FIRST PILGRIM TRAIL]
[PLYMOUTH AS THE PILGRIMS MADE IT]
[LEYDEN STREET TO-DAY FROM BURIAL HILL]
[BIRDS OF THE PLYMOUTH WOODS, WISE AND OTHERWISE]
[BILLINGTON PATH ALONG THE BORDER OF "BILLINGTON SEA"]
[THE STERN AND ROCK-BOUND COAST WHICH GREETED THE PILGRIMS]
[BAYBERRY AND PITCH PINE ALONG A NANTUCKET TRAIL]
[A NANTUCKET LANE]
[ALONG A BYWAY OF THE CAPE]
[DUSTY MILLER BLOSSOMING AMONG THE CAPE DUNES]
[THE SUN SIFTING AND WINNOWING HIS GOLD FOR SUNSET]
[SUNRISE OVER THE POND]
[ROUNDING THE BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET WITHIN CALL OF THE OLD LISBON BELL]
[CAPTAIN'S HILL FROM MARSH MARGIN]
[ALONG THE SALT MARSHES]
[OUTWARD BOUND IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR]
[GEESE ON THE SAND SPIT AT PLYMOUTH]
[WILD GEESE IN FLIGHT OVER THE POND]
[THE FOX THAT SLIPS ALONG THE WINDING PATHS AT DAWN]
[A CAPE COD CEDAR CENTURIES OLD]
[THE PINES IN WINTER]
[DEER IN THE WINTER WOODS]
[PICKEREL FROM AN OLD COLONY POND]

CHAPTER I

OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS

"The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed."

So sang Felicia D. Hemans in the early years of the last century and she has been much derided by the thoughtless and irreverent who have said that the landing of the Pilgrims was not on a stern and rock-bound coast. Such scoffers evidently never sailed in by White Horse beach and "Hither Manomet" when a winter northeaster was shouldering the deep sea tides up against the cliff and a surly gale snatched the foam from high-crested waves and sent it singing and stinging inland. Could they have done this it would have been easy to understand that the coast here is stern and rock-bound in very truth. The rocks are not those of solid granite ledges, continuous portions of the great earth's lithosphere of which the coast is built farther north, at Scituate, Nahant, Rockport and farther on; but it is rock-bound with massed granite boulders, glacier rounded, water-worn, but inexpressibly stern.

All Plymouth is made up of the results of pilgrimage. How many scores of fathoms deep the real Plymouth shore lies I do not know. It is down there somewhere where it cooled into bathylithic crust back in the gray dawn of time when the earth was made. There it is part of the same ledge of which Scituate and Cohasset are built. All above that is terminal moraine, rock detritus piled upon rock foundation by the glacier. Plymouth Rock itself thus came joy riding from some ledge up Boston way, alighting from this first and greatest New England Transportation System only a few hundred thousand years before Mary Chilton arrived to set foot upon it.

Tide and tempest grind pebbles to shifting sand and give and take away beach and bar yearly, but they do not move the boulders very fast. Manomet shore and even Plymouth beach are rock-bound with these, large and small, today as they were when the Pilgrims fought their desperate, sea-beset way by them through the dusk of a winter northeaster and froze in safety under the lee of Clark's Island.

He who would see Plymouth and the Pilgrim land about it as the Pilgrims saw it may do so. Nature holds grimly onto her own and sedulously heals the scars that man makes. Beat to windward in the December twilight following that first trail of the Pilgrim pinnace, listen to the sullen boom of the breakers on the cliff, hear the growl of the surf-mauled pebbles on Plymouth beach, feel the sting of the freezing spray and the bitter grip of the north wind and you shall find this first Pilgrim trail the same today as it was three hundred years ago.

Plymouth is a manufacturing city, a residence town, a resort and a thriving business centre all in one. Except in its carefully preserved shrines you shall find little suggestion of the Pilgrims themselves, but you have only to step out of town to find their very land all about you, traces of their occupancy, the very marks of their feet, worn in the earth itself. A trail cuts easily into the forest mould. Once well worn there centuries fail to remove it. The paths the Pilgrims trod radiate from Plymouth to a score of places far and near. They tramped to Sandwich and the canal region, to Middleboro, Bridgewater and Duxbury as we know them now, to Boston; sooner or later to all the world. Some of the trails they trod may be forgotten, some of them are main-travelled highways, others remain narrow footpath ways through a country beautiful and often as unsophisticated as it was when the feet of the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and there their very forest trees, await you still. For Indian and panther you need not look; wolf or bear you will hardly see; the wild turkeys are gone; otherwise the wild life of the forest remains.

The first Pilgrim land trail is today Leyden street, leading from the water's edge to their fort on Burial Hill. You may follow it, though the marks of Pilgrim feet are buried beneath city pavement, save perhaps on the crest of the hill itself, and though bluebird and robin flutter shyly to its upper end in spring as did their pilgrim fathers before them, the arbutus, from earliest days to this the Plymouth flower, no longer grows on its margin. He who has not longed to pick a mayflower in Plymouth on Mayday is not a New Englander. That is perhaps why the arbutus no longer grows along byways of the old town as once it did. Instead you must seek the Pilgrim paths out of town to find it.

One of these leads down along shore, over Manomet and on through Plymouth woods toward the old trysting place with the Dutch traders. The men of New Amsterdam, journeying in boats along Long Island Sound and up Buzzards Bay met the Plymouth men yearly and held a most decorous carnival of barter. Tradition has it that the Plymouth men made the trip by sea to the nearest point on the Bay shore. I do not know if the meeting place is known, but I know a moss-grown and gnarled red cedar on the margin of Buttermilk Bay, as we now call it, which I am sure was growing there when the first swapping of commodities took place and in the shade of whose branches the grave and sturdy traders may have sat.

Here and there in Pilgrim land you find a tree like that, one that by some chance the axe of the woodman has spared as one generation of wood cutters followed another, that still stands where the seed fell, no man knows how many centuries ago. We have trees in eastern Massachusetts to whom a thousand years is but as yesterday when it is passed, many on which the centuries have rested lightly. I think this Onset cedar one of these.

The road that leads from Plymouth to it is vexed daily by innumerable wheels; of a summer holiday the wayside watcher may count the motors by the thousand; yet you have but to step a rod or two off its tarred, tire-beaten surface to find wild woodland as primitive as it was three hundred years ago. The spring seeking motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere, after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but those who built for modern traffic took little heed of old-time footpath ways. They gouged the hills, they filled the hollows and drew their long black scar behind for mile after mile.

Like the deer and the wild fowl the old trails care little for this. They wander on their own gentle, untrammelled way, hither and yon, here beset by heavy forest growth, there a tangle of greenbrier and scrub oaks, losing you often, picking you up again when you least expect it, but always leading you off the humdrum highway of today into the gentle wildernesses of old time romance. You find them margined with marks of the pioneer. It may be just a hollow which was once his tiny cellar-hole or a rectangular mound where the logs of his cabin tumbled into the mould, perhaps a moss-grown, weather-beaten house itself with its barberry bush or its lilac still holding firmly where the pioneer householder set it. These old trails of the Plymouth woods may be just of one family's making, leading from house to pasture and woodlot, or they may be bits of an old-time footpath way first worked out by the Indians themselves no one knows how many centuries ago. Find me an eskar in Plymouth county, a "hogback ridge" as our forbears were wont to call it, and the chances are fair that along its narrow summit edge I'll show you an Indian trail. Sometimes the Pilgrim paths adopted these and later made them roadways.

As you go southward in this region you find traces of an ancient type of fencing that I have not seen elsewhere. It may have been a hedgemaker's trick, brought from the old country. The Cape pioneers slashed young white oaks growing along the road margin, bent them, say two feet above the ground, without severing, and laid them level, the tops bound tight with withes to the next trunk. Thus they had a fence that would restrain cattle and that grew stouter as the years went by. You find these trees growing thus today, their trunks a foot or two in diameter, bending at right angles just above ground and stretching horizontally, while what were once limbs now grow trunks from the grotesque butt. A remnant of fence like this along an almost obliterated trail in an ancient wood gives a hobgoblin character to the place.

The heath family, all the way from clethra which begins it to cranberry which ends it, dwells in beauty and diversity all about in the Plymouth woods, making them fragrant the year round. Some of them help feed the world, notably the cranberries and the huckleberries of a score of varieties from the pale, inch high, earliest sweet blueberries growing on the dry hillsides to the giants of the deep swamp, hanging out of reach above your head sometimes and as big as a thumb end. These provide manna for all who will gather it, from late June till early September, when the checkerberries ripen, to hang on all winter. Others make the world better for their beauty and fragrance and of these the ground laurel, the trailing arbutus, the mayflower, is best known and loved.

The First Pilgrim Trail

It is easy to fancy some sombre Pilgrim, weary with the woes of that first winter, his heart hungry for "the may" of English hedgerows, stepping forth some raw April morning which as yet showed no sign of opening spring buds, stopping as his feet rustled in brown oak leaves up Town Brook way, puzzled by the endearing, enticing fragrance on the wings of the raw wind. I always think of him as stopping for a moment to dream of home, looking about in a discouraged way for hawthorn which he knows is not there, then spying the little cluster of evergreen leaves with their pink and white blossoms nestling among the oak leaves at his very feet and kneeling to pluck and sniff them in some thing like adoration. It may not have been that way at all, but someone found that first mayflower and loved and named it.

The world at large, hurtling through Plymouth in its high-powered motor cars, stops along the road over Manomet and finds its arbutus there each May. I like to look for mine along the path that Billington took to his "sea," a way that leads out of Leyden street and up along Town Brook. I think the second oldest of the Plymouth land trails lies up that way. If the first was to and from the fort the second surely lay up along the brook, and I have an idea the Indians had preceded them in the making of this.

A great terminal moraine once blocked off Billington sea from the ocean, but Town Brook released it. Long before the Pilgrims came it had cut its valley through the great wall of gravel and occupied it in peace till latter day highways and factories came to vex it. In spite of these, unhampered bits of the original brook show in Plymouth itself and you are not far out of town before you see more of it.

It flows out of the "sea" unhindered now save by pickerel weed and sagittaria, rush and meadow grasses, and in woodsy places by brook alder, clethra, huckleberry and spice-bush that lean into it as they wrestle with greenbrier and clematis. The mayflower snuggles into the leaves along its drier upper margins, here and there, and is to be found on the borders of the "sea" more plentifully. Plymouth has done well in making of this region a park, beautifying it mainly by letting it alone, merely cutting new Pilgrim trails through it. Billington's path along the pond shore is thus made easy for your feet and is marked with his name that you may not miss it. But if you would see the real Billington path, made for him by generations of Indians before his day but the one that I believe he trod, you will look nearer the water's edge. There, tangled amidst undergrowth now, buried deep in brown autumn leaves, it is yet visible enough, cut into the soft sand of the pond bank. In places it is cut deep. In places it is all but obliterated or vanishes altogether for a little way, perhaps divides into two or three as the local needs of moccasined travellers called for, but all along the pond margin it goes. This is an old Plymouth trail indeed, linking the Plymouth of today with that of the time of the Pilgrims, and long before. There are many such that lead out of Plymouth, glimpsing for us the world of three hundred years ago mirrored in the eyes, the ideas, the ideals of today. Let us search them out.

Plymouth as the Pilgrims made it

CHAPTER II

PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS

The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came to Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the Pilgrim's shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken mast limped in under the lee of Clark's Island. No promise of May had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill, yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful is April in Pilgrim land. This gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white frost followed on all the land.

In the darkest hour of this night, I saw a thin point of light rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of dawn, making port on the shore of "hither Manomet." In the velvety blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender sail curved sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop seemed drawn to the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of Sindbad the Sailor, and when it magically climbed the dark headland and sailed away into the sky above, it drew out of the sea behind it the first light of glorious morning. From Manomet head to the Gurnet the horizon showed a level sea line of palest garnet that deepened, moment by moment, till the coming sun arched it with rose and bounded from it, a flattened globule of ruby fire. I like to think that the path of gold with which the sun glorified the stippled steel of the sea was the very one by which the first Mayflower came in from Provincetown, the sails nobly set and the ship pressing onward to that memorable anchorage within the protecting white arm of the sandspit.

I like to think that the sweet curve of the old moon's slender sail sways in by Manomet each month in loving remembrance of that other shallop that so magically won by the roar of the breakers on the dark point and brought the simple record of faith and courage for our loving remembrance. But whether these things are so or not I know that the very first rays of the morning sun pass in level neglect over the bay and the town to lay a wreath of light on the brow of Burial Hill and touch with celestial gold the simple granite shaft that stands over the grave of William Bradford, historian of Plymouth Colony and writer of the first American book. Such is the unfailing ceremony of sunrise in Plymouth, and such it has been since the first Pilgrim was laid to rest on the hill which lifts its head above the roofs and spires to the free winds of the world.

Plymouth is fortunate in this hill. It bears the very presence of its founders above the enterprise and ferment of a modern town which grows rapidly toward city conditions, a hill which is set upon a city and cannot be hid. Factories and city blocks and all the wonders of steam and electrical contrivance which would have astounded and amazed Bradford and his fellows are common in Plymouth today as they are common to all cities and towns of a vast country, yet the graves of the simple pioneers rise above them as the story of their lives transcends in interest that of all others that have come after them. The book that Bradford wrote, as the tales that Homer told, will last as long as books are read. Plymouth may pass, as Troy did, but the story of its heroes will remain. Bradford's book, which was our first, may well, at the end of time, be rated our greatest.

The trailing arbutus is peculiarly the flower of Plymouth. Not that it grows there alone, indeed within easy reach of the landing place of the Pilgrims it is not easy now to find it. Once, no doubt, it blossomed about the feet of the pioneers, sending up its fragrance to them as they trod sturdily along their first street and through their new found fields that first spring after their arrival. My, but their hearts must have been homesick for the English May they had left behind! and in memory of the pink and white of the hawthorn hedges they called this pink and white flower which peered from the oval-leaved vines trailed about their feet, mayflower. It surely must have grown on the slopes of Burial Hill, down toward Town Brook, but now one will look in vain for it there. I found my first blossom of the year by following the brook up to its headwaters in Billington Sea. The brook itself is greatly changed since Bradford's day. Its waters are now held back by dams where it winds through the sand hills and one mill after another sits by the side of the ponds thus formed. Yet the "sea" itself must be much the same in itself and its surroundings as it was in Billington's time. Nor do I wholly believe the legend which has it that Billington thought it was a sea in very truth. It is too obviously a pond to have deceived even this unsophisticated wanderer. It covers but little over three hundred acres including its islands and winding coves.

*****

I think, rather, its name was given in good natured derision of Billington and his idea of the importance of his discovery, a form of quaint humor not unknown in the descendants to the Pilgrims of this day. Yet the waters of the little winding pond are as clear as those of the sea which breaks on the rocks of Manomet or the Gurnet, and the hilly shores, close set with deciduous growth, are almost as wild as they were then. The robins that greeted the dawn on Burial Hill sang here at midday, blackbirds chorused, and song sparrows sent forth their tinkling songs from the shrubby growths. Plymouth woods, here at least, are a monotony of oaks. Yet here and there in the low places a maple has become a burning bush of ruby flame, and along the bog edges the willows are in the full glory of their yellow plumes. The richest massed coloring one can see in the region today, though, is that of the cranberry bogs. Looking away from the sun the thick-set vines are a level floor of rich maroon, not a level color but a background showing the brush marks of a master painter's hand. Toward the sun this color lightens and silvers to tiny jewel points where the light glances from glossy leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs with greens, but the maroon background will still be there.

Leyden Street To-day from Burial Hill

The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even in this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year's checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft pink tints and spicy odor of the Epigaea blooms. Sometimes the pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all Epigaea and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no wonder that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry's spicy flavor permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus seems more volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom and lifts from that to course the air invisibly an aromatic fragrance that the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far to those who love it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright sun and slow moving soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth mayflower by scent. Even after the grouped leaves are surely sighted the flowers are still to be found. The winds of winter have strewn the ground deep with oak leaves and half buried the vines in them for safety from the cold. Out from among these the blossoms seem to peer shyly, like sweet little Pilgrim children, ready to draw back behind their mother's aprons if they do not like the appearance of the coming stranger. Perhaps they do withdraw at discretion, and this is very likely why some people who come from far to hunt find many mayflowers, while others get few or none.

Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows was preeminently the hawthorn, known often just as "the may." But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Caltha palustria, often known, less lovingly, as "blobs." The Caltha is common to both Europe and America and, though it is often hereabout known by the nickname of "cowslip" which the early English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.

None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold promontory of "hither Manomet." The legend has it that Eric the Red, the Viking who explored New England shores centuries before the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial hill and that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this day. I sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the rough gullies of these "highlands of Plymouth," I did not find them there.

On the landward slopes, gentler and less windswept, down toward the "sweet waters" that flow from inland to the sea, you may with patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of Manomet were full of butterflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade, the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their "mourning cloaks" of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot might well have said:

Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy,
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.

Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever present question mark from one dry leaf to another asking always that unanswerable "why?" Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter's butterfly, flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky, the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have woefully named Lycaema pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground as if a new born flower tried quivering flight, and brown Hesperiidae, "bedouins of the pathless air," buzzed in vanishing eccentricity. But it was not for these that I lingered long on the seaward crest. There below me lay the bay that the exploring Pilgrims entered at such hazard, that but the day before had been blotted out with a freezing storm and gray with snow, now smiling in unforgettable beauty at my feet, bringing irresistibly to mind the one who sang,

My soul today is far away,
Sailing the blue Vesuvian bay.

Birds of the Plymouth Woods, Wise and Otherwise

At Naples indeed could be no softer, fairer skies than this June day of late April brought to Plymouth Bay and spread over the waters that nestled within the curve of that splendid young moon of white sand that sweeps from Manomet to the tip of the sandspit, with the Gurnet far to the right and Plymouth's white houses rising in the middle distance. It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking beyond to make the memory complete.

Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them. Here were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green, that I have seen among the Florida keys. Surely it was like a transformation scene. The day before the torn sea wild with wind and the dun clouds of a northeast gale hiding the distance with a mystery of dread, a wind that beat the forest with snow and chilled to the marrow; and this day the warmth of an Italian spring and the blue Vesuvian Bay.

*****

The Pilgrims had their seasons of storm and stress, but there came to them too halcyon days like this when the mayflower bloomed in all the woodland about them, the mourning cloak butterflies danced with joy down the sunny glades, and the bay spread its wonderful blue beneath their feet in the delicious promise of June. Nor is it any wonder that in spite of hardships and disaster manifold they yet found heart to write home that it was a fayere lande and bountiful.

But for all the lure of Plymouth woods with their fragrance of trailing arbutus, from all the grandeur of the wide outlook from Manomet Heights, the hearts of all who come to Plymouth must lead them back to the resting place of the fathers on the brow of the little hill in the midst of the town. There where the grass was not yet green and the buttercups that will later shine in gold have put forth but the tiniest beginnings of their fuzzy, three-parted leaves, I watched the sun sink, big and red in a golden mist, over a land of whose coming material greatness Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims could have had no inkling. Seaward the tropic bloom of the water was all gone, and there as the sun passed I saw the cool steel of the bay catch the last rays in little dimples of silver light. Manomet withdrew, blue and mysterious in the haze of nightfall. Out over the Gurnet, beyond, the sky caught purples from the colors in the west, and there, dropping below the horizon line, east northeast toward England, I saw a sail vanish in the soft haze as if it might be the first Mayflower, sailing away from the heavy-hearted Pilgrims, toward England and home. The sun's last ray touched it with a fleck of rose as it passed, a rose-like that which tipped the petals of the mayflowers that I held in my hand, mayflowers that sent tip to me in the coolness of the gathering April night a fragrance as aromatic and beloved as is the memory of the lives of the Pilgrims that slept all about me on the brow of Burial Hill. Bradford wrote gravely and simply the chronicles of these, and no more, yet the fervent faith and sturdy love for fair play, unquenchable in the hearts of these men, breathes from every page, a fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world forevermore.

CHAPTER III

UNBUILDING A BUILDING

I tore down an old house recently, rent it part from part with my own hands and a crowbar, piling it in its constituents, bricks with bricks, timber on timber, boards with boards.

Any of us who dare love the iconoclast would be one if we dared sufficiently, and in this work I surely was an image-breaker, for the old house was more than it seemed. To the careless passer, it was a gray, bald, doddering old structure that seemed trying to shrink into the ground, untenanted, unsightly, and forlorn. I know, having analyzed it, that it was an image of New England village life of the two centuries just gone, a life even the images of which are passing, never to return.

As I knocked the old place down, it seemed to grow up, more vivid as it passed from the roadside of the visible to the realm of the remembered. You may think you know a house by living in it, but you do not; you need to unbuild it to get more than a passing acquaintance. And to unbuild a building you need to be strong of limb, heavy of hand, and sure of eye, lest the structure upon which you have fallen fall upon you; nor do business mottoes count, for you begin not at the bottom, but at the top, or near it.

Up in the attic among the cobwebs, stooping beneath the ancient rafters, dodging crumbly bunches of pennyroyal and hyssop, hung there by hands that have been dust these fifty years, you poise and swing a forty-pound crowbar with a strong uplift against the roof-board, near where one of the old-time hand-made, hammer-pointed, wrought-iron nails enters the oak timber. The board lifts an inch and snaps back into place. You hear a handful of the time-and-weatherworn shingles jump and go sputtering down the roof. You hear a stealthy rustling and scurrying all about you. Numerous tenants who pay no rent have heard eviction notice, for the house in which no men live is the abode of many races. Another blow near another nail, and more shingles jump and flee, and this time a clammy hand slaps your face. It is only the wing of a bat, fluttering in dismay from his crevice. Blow after blow you drive upon this board from beneath, till all the nails are loose, its shingle-fetters outside snap, and with a surge it rises, to fall grating down the roof, and land with a crash on the grass by the old door-stone.

The morning sun shines in at the opening, setting golden motes dancing, and caressing rafters that have not felt its touch for a hundred and fifty years, and you feel a little sob of sorrow swell in your heart, for the old house is dead, beyond hope of resurrection. With your crowbar you have knocked it in the head.

Other boards follow more easily, for now you may use a rafter for the fulcrum of your iron lever and pry where the long nails grip the oak too tenaciously, and it is not long before you have the roof unboarded. And here you may have a surprise and be taught a lesson in wariness which you will need if you would survive your unbuilding. The bare rafters, solid oak, six inches square, hewn from the tree, as adze-marks prove, are halved together at the top and pinned with an oak pin. At the lower end, where they stand upon the plates, they are not fastened, but rest simply on a V-shaped cut, and when the last board is off they tumble over like a row of ninepins and you may be bowled out with them if you are not clever enough to foresee this.

As with the roof-boards, so with the floors and walls. Blows with the great bar, or its patient use as a lever, separate part from part, board from joist, and joist from timber, and do the work, and you learn much of the wisdom and foolishness of the old-time builder as you go on. Here he dovetailed and pinned the framework so firmly and cleverly that nothing but human patience and ingenuity could ever get it apart; there he cut under the ends of splendid strong floor joists and dropped them into shallow mortises, so that but an inch or two of the wood really took the strain, and the joist seemed likely to split and drop out, of its own weight. You see the work of the man who knew his business and used only necessary nails, and those in the right places; and the work of that other, who was five times as good a carpenter because he used five times as many nails!

You learn, too, how the old house grew from a very humble beginning to an eleven-room structure that covered a surprising amount of ground, as one generation after another passed and one owner succeeded another. In this the counsel of the local historian helps you much, for he comes daily and sits by as you work, and daily tells you the story of the old place, usually beginning in the middle and working both ways; for the unbuilding of a building is a great promoter of sociability. Fellow townsmen whom you feel that you hardly know beyond a rather stiff bowing acquaintance hold up their horses and hail you jovially, even getting out to chat a while or lend a hand, each having opinions according to his lights. Strickland, whose prosperity lies in swine, sees but one use for the old timbers. "My!" he says, "what a hog-pen this would make!" Downes is divided in his mind between hen-houses and green-houses, and thinks there will be enough lumber and sashes for both. Lynde suspects that you are going to establish gypsy camps wholesale, while Estey, carpenter and builder, and wise in the working of wood, knows that you are lucky if the remains are good enough for fire-wood.

Little for these material aspects cares the historian, however, as he skips gayly from one past generation to another, waving his phantoms off the stage of memory with a sweep of his cane, and poking others on to make their bow to the man with the crowbar, who thus, piecing the narrative out with his own detective work in wood, rebuilds the story. It was but a little house which began with two rooms on the ground floor and two attic chambers, built for Stoddard who married the daughter of the pioneer landowner of the vicinity, and it nestled up within a stone's throw of the big house, sharing its prosperity and its history. No doubt the Stoddards were present at the funeral in the big house, when stern old Parson Dunbar stood above the deceased, in the presence of the assembled relatives, and said with Puritanical severity, "My friends, there lies the body, but the soul is in hell!"

The dead man had failed to attend the parson's sermons at the old First Congregational Church, near by, a church that with successive pastors has slipped from the Orthodoxy of Parson Dunbar to the most modern type of present-day Unitarianism.

A later dweller in the old house lives in local tradition as publishing on the bulletin board in the church vestibule his intention of marriage with a fair lady of the parish, as was the custom of the day. Another fair lady entering the church on Sunday morning pointed dramatically at the notice, saying to the sexton, "Take that notice down, and don't you dare to put it up again till I give the word."

The sexton, seeming to know who was in charge of things, took it down and it was not again posted for two years. The marriage then took place. A few years later the wife died, and after a brief period of mourning another notice was posted announcing the marriage of the widower and the lady who had forbidden the banns of his first marriage. The second marriage took place without interference, and they lived happily ever after, leaving posterity in doubt whether the incident in the church vestibule was the climax in a battle royal between the two ladies for the hand of the man who dwelt in the old house, or whether the man himself had loved not wisely but too many.

Another dweller in the old house was a locally celebrated singer who for years led the choir and the music in the old church, having one son whom a wealthy Bostonian educated abroad, "becoming," said the historian sagely, "a great tenor singer, but very little of a man." These were days of growing importance for the old house.

Two new rooms were added to the ground-floor back by the simple expedient of tacking long spruce rafters to the roof, making a second roof over the old one, leaving the old roof with boards and shingles still on it. Thus there grew a roof above a roof,-a shapeless void of a dark attic,-and below, the two rooms.

The use of the spruce rafters and hemlock boarding marks a period in building little more than a half-century gone. About this time the house acquired a joint owner, for a local lawyer of considerable importance joined his fortunes and his house to it, bringing both with him. This section, two more rooms and an attic, was moved in from another part of the town and attached very gingerly, by one corner, to one corner. It was as if the lawyer had had doubts as to how the two houses might like each other, and had arranged things so that the bond might be broken with as small a fracture as possible. This "new" part may well have been a hundred years old at the time, for, whereas the original house was boarded with oak on oak, this was boarded with splendid clear pine on oak, marking the transition from the pioneer days when all the timber for a house was obtained from the neighboring wood, through the time when the splendid pumpkin pines of the Maine forests were the commonest and cheapest sources of lumber, to our own, when even poor spruce and shaky hemlock are scarce and costly. In the same way you note in these three stages of building three types of nails. First is the crude nail hammered out by the local blacksmith, varying in size and shape, but always with a head formed by splitting the nail at the top and tending the parts to the right and left. These parts are sometimes quite long, and clinch back into the board like the top of a capital T. Then came a better nail of wrought iron, clumsy but effective; and, later still, the cut nail in sole use a generation ago. That modern abomination, the wire nail, appears only in repairs.

Thus the old house rose from four rooms to eight, with several attics, and the singer and lawyers pass off the scene, to be followed by the Baptist deacon who later seceded and became a Millerite, holding meetings of great fervor in the front room, where one wall used to be covered with figures which proved beyond a doubt that the end of the world was at hand, and where later he and his fellow believers appeared in their ascension robes. He too added a wing to the old house, three rooms and another attic, and when I had laid bare the timbers of this the historian rose, holding both hands and his cane towards heaven, and orated fluently.

"There!" he said, "that's Wheeler! I knew it was, for the old deeds couldn't be read in any other way. They told me it was built on by the Millerite, but I knew better. This was moved up from the Wheeler farm, and it was a hundred years old and more when it came up, sixty years ago. I knew it. Look at those old cap-posts!" I dodged the cane as it waved, and took another look, for it was worth while. There were the corner posts, only seven feet high, but ten inches square at the bottom, solid oak, swelling to fourteen inches at the top, with double tenants on which sat the great square oak-plates, dovetailed and pinned together, and pinned again to the cap. A hundred and fifty years old and more was this addition, which the Millerite had moved up from the Wheeler farm and built on for his boot-shop; yet these great oak cap-posts marked a period far more remote. They were second-hand when they went into the Wheeler building, for there were in them the marks of mortising that had no reference to the present structure. Some building, old a century and a half ago, had been torn down and its timbers used for the part that "had been Wheeler."

Thus the old house grew again as it fell, and the old-time owners and inhabitants stepped forth into life once more. Yet I found traces of other tenants that paid neither rent nor taxes, yet occupied apartments that to them were commodious and comfortable. In the attic were the bats, but not they alone. Snuggled up against the chimney in the southern angle, right under the ridge-pole, was a whole colony of squash bugs which had wintered safely there and were only waiting for the farmer's squash vines to become properly succulent. A bluebottle fly slipped out of a crevice and buzzed in the sun by the attic window. Under every ridge-board and corner-board, almost under every shingle, were the cocoons and chrysalids of insects, thousands of silent lives waiting but the touch of the summer sun to make them vocal.

On the ground floor, within walls, were the apartments of the rats, their empty larders choked with corn-cobs showing where once had been feasting, their bed chambers curiously upholstered with rags laboriously dragged in to senseless confusion. The field mice had the floor above. Here and there on the plates, between joists, and over every window and door, were their nests, carefully made of wool, chewed from old garments and made fine, soft, and cosy. Their larders were full of cherry-stones, literally bushels on bushels of them, each with a little round hole gnawed in it and the kernel extracted. As the toil of the human inhabitants year after year had left its mark on the floors of the house, worn thin everywhere, in places worn through with the passing and repassing of busy feet, so had the generations of field mice left behind them mute witnesses of patient, enormous labor. From the two cherry trees in the neighboring yard how many miles had these shy little people traveled, unseen of men, with one cherry at a time, to lay in this enormous supply!

Within the chimneys were the wooden nests of chimney swifts, glued firmly to the bricks; under the cornice was the paper home of a community of yellow hornets; and under the floor where was no cellar, right next the base of the warm chimney, were apartments that had been occupied by generations of skunks. Each space between floor joists and timber was a room. In one was a huge clean nest of dried grass, much like that which red squirrels build of cedar bark. Another space had been the larder, for it was full of dry bones and feathers; others were for other uses, all showing plainly the careful housekeeping of the family in the basement.

I looked long and carefully, as the work of destruction went on, for the pot of gold beneath the floor, or the secret hoard which fancy assigns to all old houses; but not even a stray penny turned up. Yet I got several souvenirs. One of these is a nail in my foot whereby I shall remember my iconoclasm for some time. Another is a curiously wrought wooden scoop, a sort of butter-worker, the historian tells me, carved, seemingly, with a jackknife from a pine plank. A third is a quaint, lumbering, heavy, hand-wrought fire shovel which appeared somewhat curiously. Reentering a room which I had cleared of everything movable, I found it standing against the door-jamb. Fire-shovels have no legs, so I suppose it was brought in. However, none of the neighbors has confessed, and I am content to think it belonged in the old house and was brought back, perhaps by the Baptist deacon who "backslided" and became a Millerite. It has been rusted by water and burned by fire, and I don't believe even Sherlock Holmes could make a wiser deduction.

As I write, a section of one of the old "Wheeler" cap-posts is crumbling to ashes in my fireplace. It was of solid oak, of a texture as firm and grainless almost as soapstone. No water had touched this wood, I know, for a hundred and fifty years, perhaps for almost a hundred added to that. For hours it retained its shape, glowing like a huge block of anthracite, and sending forth a heat as great but infinitely more kindly and comforting. Toward the last the flames which came from it lost their yellow opaqueness and slipped fluttering upward in a transparent opalescence which I never before saw in fire. It was as if the soul of the old house, made out of all that was beautiful and kindly in the hopes and longings of those who built it and lived in it, stood revealed a monument in its shining beauty before it passed on.

CHAPTER IV

FOREFATHERS' DAY

One does not need to seek the brow of Cole's Hill very early on Forefathers' Day to see the star of morning rise and shine upon Plymouth. It marks the passing of one of the four longest nights of the year, those of the four days before Christmas, a memorable period for all Americans, for during it the Pilgrim Fathers came to Plymouth. According to the best authorities the exploring party set foot on the famous rock on Monday, Dec. 21 (new style). But the ship herself did not enter the harbor for five days. Friday, the 18th, the explorers reached Clark's Island after dark and spent the night most miserably, though it was next door to a miracle that they got there alive and no doubt they were thankful for that. How they battled by Manomet Point in the half gale and high sea, the night already upon them and the harbor unknown to any aboard, their rudder gone and their mast "broken in three places," we know from Bradford's graphic description. On Saturday they rested on their island and dried their clothes and their gunpowder. On Sunday they prayed and otherwise kept the Sabbath as was their want. On Monday they went ashore on the mainland, found the situation desirable, and struck boldly across the bay to the Mayflower inside the hook of the Cape, to tell the news.

So the first of the Forefathers set foot on Plymouth soil on the 21st of December, according to the revised calendar. But the Mayflower herself did not enter the harbor till five days later.

"On the 15th of December," says Bradford (on the 25th as we now reckon it, though ten days before the England they had left behind would celebrate Christmas), "they weighed anchor to go to the place they had discovered, and came within two leagues of it, but were fain to bear up again, but the 16th day the wind became fair and they arrived safely in the harbor and afterward took a better view of the place and resolved where to pitch their dwellings and the 25th day began to erect the first house for common use, to receive them and their goods.

*****

Forefathers' Day is rightly set, then, on the 21st, though we have really an all-winter landing of the Pilgrims, the ship remaining in the harbor and being more or less their refuge until the 5th of April, 1621. In some respects the place of their landing has vastly changed. The waterfront is ugly with rough wharves and coal pockets, store-houses and factories. The famous rock itself reposes beneath a monstrous granite canopy and seems to have so little connection with the sea that one at first sight is inclined to levity, wondering where the landing party got the gang plank which bridged such a distance. Yet it was in all reverence that I sought Plymouth, hoping to in some measure bridge the three centuries that lie between that day and this, and see the New World in some measure as they saw it, at the same season.

For at least the seasons have not changed. The storms and the calms, the snow and the sunshine, come now, as then, in cycles that may not match day by day in all instances, but, taking year by year, come surprisingly near it. There is more in the Old Farmer's Almanack's serene forecast of the weather for an entire year ahead than most of us are willing to admit. There are people who back its oracle against the Weather Bureau and claim that they travel warmer and drier by so doing. Yet if one makes a study of Farmers' Almanack weather he finds that it wins by predicting the same storms and the same cold snaps, the same drought and the same rain for just about the same seasons, year after year, spreading the prophecy over days enough to give it considerable leeway. "About this time expect a storm," it says, and in the ten days of the aforesaid time the storm is pretty apt to come.

So, to my joy, I found in Plymouth on my few days there on Forefathers' Day week just about the weather Bradford reports for that first voyage of the Mayflower's shallop to its harbor. "After some hour's sailing," says Bradford, "it began to snow and rain, and about the middle of the afternoon the wind increased and the sea became very rough and they broke their rudder and it was as much as two men could do to steer her with a couple of oars. But their pilot bade them be of good cheer as he saw the harbor, but the storm increased and night coming on they bore what sail they could to get in while they could see. But herewith they broke their mast in three pieces and their sail fell overboard in a very grown sea, so that they were like to have been cast away."

Billington Path along the Border of "Billington Sea"

Anyone who knows that Massachusetts coast in December will recognize the weather, a wind from the northeast bringing mingled rain and snow, not a gale, but a squally wind, with a "very grown sea" such as beat upon the coast at the beginning of this week, sending the white horses racing up the beach below Manomet Head, which has been named for them, and smashing in continuous thunder on the stern and rockbound cliffs between White Horse Beach and Plymouth harbor.

To see Manomet in stormy December is to know how grim it is. The wooded headland which the little shallop so desperately won by in the gloom of that December twilight and storm has changed little if any since that time. Stern and rock-bound it certainly is. The sea of centuries has beaten against the great drumlins of boulder-till and has not moved the boulders that bind them together. At the most it has but washed out the smaller ones, leaving the sea front surfaced with great white granite rocks that gleam like marble in the sundown to the limits of the washing tide, then shine olive green with the froth of the waves. From the sands of White Horse Beach to those of the Spit in Plymouth harbor there is no place where that storm-tossed shallop might have made a landing with any hope of safety. To have turned toward the shore as the pilot bade them when the mast broke would have been to drown the whole company in the surf, in which case Plymouth would never have been. No one knows the name of the "lustie seaman" who then usurped the command and bade the rowers "if they were men, about with her, or else they were all cast away." On the words of this courageous unknown hung the lives of the company and perhaps the fate of the expedition itself. It is a stern and rock-bound coast in very truth, and if it seemed as dark and forbidding on that December nightfall in 1620 as it did on one of the same date this year, I for one would not have blamed them had they sailed away, never to come back. For a quarter of a mile off shore scattered boulders curried the surf and fluffed it into white foam. Its deafening roar was filled with menace. Salt spray and sleet mingled cut one's face rods back from the shore, and high up the dark hill behind rose the gnarled woodland, wailing and tossing its giant branches. With the fall of night no light was visible from sea or shore. All was as primal, as chaotic, as menacing as it had been on that Friday night three centuries before when the Pilgrims' shallop beat in by the point, its tiny white sail drowned like the wing of a seagull in the dusky welter of the sea.

The Stern and Rock-bound Coast which greeted the Pilgrims

That night, as on the night that the Pilgrims came, the wind changed to the westward and blew the storm to sea. Yet all night from Cole's Hill I saw the dark clouds to seaward, lingering there and refusing to be driven completely away, and in the gray of dawn the morning star rose out of them, overmatching with its clear light that of the Gurnet which shone from the murk of their depths below. The frozen ground rang beneath the heel and the cold had bitten deep. Out of the northwest a few flakes of snow came and it was long before the sun shone through the clouds and touched the top of Manomet Hill. Yet when it did it came with a burst of golden glory and filled the sky with such rosy and benign colors that one half expected to see a flight of Raphael's cherubs through it to earth. And all the land beneath was softened with a blue haze from east to south, making of it a country of romance through which pricked towers of Aladdin palaces and in which one knew at sight that he might find all his dearest dreams coming true: Thus the Pilgrims saw it that first morning from Clark's Island and the sight must have warmed the hearts of them and dried the tears out as it dried the garments wet with salt spray and cold rain.

The wind from the west was keen for the next few days, but it blew all the forebodings out of the sky and to find the south side of a hill or even a thicket was to find perfect comfort. The sea off Manomet was no longer chaotic and menacing, but was stippled with dancing light on a soft, rich blue that was as soothing to the sense as the other had been disquieting. Along the south of White Horse Beach the lapidary surf had strewn quartz pebbles that gleamed in the clear sun like precious stones. It took little effort of the imagination to find pocketfuls of rubies, pearls, sapphires, and amethysts among these, and had it indeed been "bright jewels of the mine" which the voyagers sought they might have been pardoned for thinking they had found them there. And all ashore under this alluring blue haze lay a country that was superlatively lovely even under frozen skies and on the shortest day of the year. Southerly toward it the shallop sailed in 1620, under flocks of whirling white gulls, through flocks of black and white Labrador ducks that then wintered in numbers along our shores, from Clark's Island to the mouth of Town Brook.

Factories and dwellings line Town Brook, now in place of the primeval forests of pine and oak. Its waters leap one dam after another, but cannot escape pollution till their dark tide mingles with that of the clear sea. But for all that the contour of the chasms in the big sand hills through which it flows to the sea is changed but little. The low sun leaves it in shadow most of the day and one can fancy the Pilgrim children and perhaps their elders glancing often up its shadowy canon under black growth, a mysterious gulch down which at any time might stride the savages they so feared, or other, worse terrors of the unknown wilderness. The little knowledge of their day was but a tiny oasis in the vast desert of unknown things, and in that country to the south and west that was so alluring under the golden glow of the sun through its soft blue haze might dwell both gorgons and chimeras dire. For though the children were not with the explorers when they landed from the shallop on Forefathers' Day, they came five days later in the Mayflower itself.

There were twenty-eight of these children, varying in age from the babe in arms to well-grown, lusty youths and maidens. Christmas was at hand, and one fancies that all knew much about it, and spoke little, perhaps not at all. So far as record goes they had broken absolutely from all that they believed the follies of the fatherland. Yet in the hearts of many, one can but think, must have remained warm memories of Yule logs, of the boar's head, piping hot and decked out with holly berries, and of the low-ceiled, oak-wainscotted dining halls of Old World houses all alight with candles and green with Christmas decorations. It is a pity that in repudiating the folly they had to repudiate also the fun. For just ashore in this land of mystery to which they had come were opportunities for Christmas greenery and Christmas feasting which they would have done well to take. The English holly they had left behind, yet along Town Brook grew the black alder with its red berries that are so pretty a substitute for the others, a holly itself, or at least an Ilex. All about Plymouth in the low grounds may be found these cheery, bright red berries, even over on the seaward slope of Manomet Head I found them, snuggling in hollows where tiny rivulets trickle down to the sea, though on the ridge above them the oaks were dwarfed and storm-beaten till one has difficulty in recognizing them for the variety of tree that they are.

It is easy to believe that down to the very rack on which they landed crept the club-moss which the descendants of the Pilgrims so soon learned to call "evergreen." Tons of it we use today in our Christmas decorations, nor does the supply from the Massachusetts woods seem to diminish, ground-pine, common, and "coral" evergreen, all varieties of the club-moss, that are commonest out of the dozen that we have in all. Just up those dark gullies Town Brook would have led them, as it will lead anyone today, to a country that now, as it was then, is rich in winter beauties of the woodland with which the exiles might well have decorated the cabin of the Mayflower. And just within the woods in any direction waited for them, had they had the will and the wisdom to seek them, all kinds of Christmas cheer. Deer were there, wild turkeys in great flocks and two varieties of grouse as tame as chickens on a farm, and more delicious than any Christmas goose which might have been served them in Holland or England. There were no savages about Plymouth at the time and they might have travelled the woods boldly, instead of taking prudent council of their fears. But they need not have gone so far as that for their Christmas feast. The sandy flats of nearby creeks were full of clams and the sea of fish. The boar's head they might not have, but there were splendid substitutes for it if they had cared to make their Christmas feast of products of the new land to which they had come.

Against all this, no doubt, they sternly set their faces, and indeed, instead of feasting and good cheer on their December 25th, they set soberly to work to build their first common house, cutting greenery indeed, but not for decoration, and dining abstemiously on the stores that they had shipped months before in England. One can but believe that had they for a few bright holidays put their fears behind them with their solemnity and celebrated their own safe landing with a few roasted turkeys, a few boiled cod and some clam soup, eaten in an evergreen-decorated cabin of their good ship, or about a barbecue fire on shore, they might have taken a step toward warding off the sickness which was even then fastening itself upon them. But they certainly did not, and in visiting their landing-place on their landing-day and trying to see the world here as they then saw it, one must put such riotous thoughts out of mind, as he must put the great present-day town out of it.

Those two things aside on any before Christmas week it is possible to see the landing-place of the Pilgrims much as they saw it, to feel the same stormy weather sweep across the same sea and to see landward the same hills clad with dark forests tossing their giant branches and seeming to hold much of mystery and dread. To know just a little of what they saw and felt one need but to stand on the brow of Manomet Head when a December night lowers and the northeast wind is hurling the surf on the rocks out of "a very grown sea."

CHAPTER V

THE SINGING PINES

The pines were asleep in the noonday heat
That shimmered down the lea,
But they waked with the roar of a wave-swept shore
When the wind came in from the sea.
They sang of ships, and the bosun piped,
The hoarse watch roared a tune,
The taut sheets whined in the twanging wind,
You heard the breakers croon.
For their brothers, masts on a thousand keels,
Had sent a greeting free,
And the answering song swelled clear and strong
When the wind came in from the sea.

Last night I heard the pines sing again. A winter midnight was on the woods, while a northeaster smote the coast, a dozen miles away, with the million sledges of the surf. So mighty was the story of this smiting that for long I thought the pines sang of nothing else. In places and at times they told it with astonishing fidelity. A forty-mile gale muttered and grumbled to itself high in air above. Its voice was that of the gale anywhere when unobstructed. You may hear it at sea or ashore, a hubbub of tones indistinguishable as gust shoulders against gust and grumbles about it. In the quiet at the bottom of the wood I could hear this, too, especially at times when the wind lifted above the pine tops, leaving them in hushed expectancy of the story to come, a telling oratorical pause. For a little the voice of the gale itself would come burbling down into the momentary stillness, then with a gasp at the awesomeness of the tale the pines would take up the story again. In it there was none of the dainty romance the boughs will weave for the listener who cares to know their language of a sunny summer afternoon, little stories of tropic seas, of nodding sails and of flying fish that spring from the foam beneath the forefoot and skim the purple waves. This song was an epic of the age-long battle between the sea and the shore, a song without words, but told so well in tone that it was easy, seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen sky, the streaks of mottled foam sliding landward along the weltering backs of black waves, spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, showing the roots of the ledges among boulders brown with weed and sea wrack, then swing forward with seemingly irresistible might, to be shattered as if their crystal was that of glass and to fly skyward a hundred feet, scintillant white star drift of comminuted sea. The crash of such waves on such rocks, the hollow diapason of their like on sands, and the shrill roar of a pebbly beach torn and tossed by the waves, all sprang from nothingness into vibrant being there in the black woods as the gale shouldered by the pine tops.

There is a point where the pines group on the pond shore and look expectantly east, wistful of the sea. Here they caught the full force of the gale and sang mightily, a wild, deep-toned, marching symphony of crashing forces. Now and then a lull came, as comes in the fiercest gales, and in the vast silence which ensued I heard the pines across the pond singing antiphonally. Black as it was under the trees, there was a moon behind the night. No suggestion of it showed through the clouds, yet from the pond surface itself came a weird twilight, filtered no doubt through a mile of flying scud a mile above, reflected from the wind-swept surface and showing these distant pines lifting heads of murk against the murky sky. But their antiphonal shout was no pine-voiced song of the sea, it was the sea itself. Again and again I listened in successive lulls. I could not believe it the pines. I heard so surely the rush of waves, the deep boom of beating surges, all the mingled clangor of the on-shore gale, that I thought through some atmospheric trick I was listening to the thing itself; the uproar swept over the hills a dozen miles inland. Only by marching up the pond shore until the pines across were south instead of east of me did I prove to myself that it was they and not the sea in very truth that I heard.

Back again in the Stygian darkness of the grove it was easy to note how the pines protect their own. On the beach the smothering onrush of the gale beat me down, drove me before it. Yet I had but to walk inland a dozen yards to find a calm. The outermost trees shunted the gale and half the time it did not touch even the tops of those a hundred feet in. Walking out into the midnight storm, I had wondered how it fared with the small folk of the forest. So fierce was the onslaught of the wind that it seemed as if the birds might be blown from their roosts, the squirrels shaken from their nests. Under the shelter of the trees themselves I knew they were as safe as I from any harm from the wind. There was not enough of it below the tree-tops to ruffle a feather.

To lay one's ear closely and firmly against the trunk of one of these pines was to curiously get an inkling of what was going on far up among the branches. It is quite like listening at a telephone receiver, the wood like the wire bringing to the ear sound of many things going on within touch of it. Thus placed, I was conscious that the seemingly immobile tree swayed rhythmically, just the very slightest swaying in the world, and this I seemed to hear. It was as if the slight readjustment of the woody fibre gave me a faint thrumming sound, a tiny music of motion that was a delight to the ear after the beat and bellow of the gale beyond.

Twigs rapped one upon another, making little crisp sounds. Most surprising of all, however, was a tinkling tattoo of musical notes as if a dryad within were tapping out woodland melodies on a xylophone. I listened long to this. It was not exactly a comfortable position. To hear I must press, and the tree bark was hard and the rain ran down the trunk and into my ear. Yet the music was exquisite, a little runic rhyme, repeated over and over again with quaint variations but with neither beginning nor end. It was wonderfully wild and fairylike. Who would stop for water in his ear or a pain in the lobe of it? Midnight, the middle of the gale, the middle of the woods; perhaps here was that very opening into the realm of the unseen woodland folk that we all in our inmost hearts hope for and expect some day to find.

So did he feel who pulled the boughs aside,
That we might look into the forest wide.
*****
Telling us how fair trembling Syrinx fled
Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread.
Poor nymph-poor Pan-how he did weep to find
Naught but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation, balmy pain.

It may have been the dryad, playing the xylophone for a dance unseen by my gross mortal eyes, but if my water-logged ear did not deceive me-and I hope it did-it was only the beat of the big drops of rain on the twigs above, clarified and made resonant by its passage through the vibrant wood to my ear. At any rate, it was a most delightful musical entertainment of which I fancy myself the discoverer, and I hope it was the dryad. He who reads may believe as he will.

Beyond the pines I found the wind in the woods. Among the bare limbs of the deciduous growth the storm wailed and clattered its way on about my head as I felt out the path with my feet for a half mile to a pine-crowned hilltop. Again I was in sanctuary. The hilltop carried us up-the pines and me-into the full sweep of the gale, yet under their spreading, beneficent arms I felt no breath of wind. Overhead I noted its own wild voice as, very near and right with it in chorus, the pines sang, swaying in time to their music as I have seen a rapt singer do. Strangely enough, in their tones up here I could hear no cry of the sea. They sang instead the tumult of the sky, the vast loneliness of distant spaces, something of the deep-toned threnody of the ancient universe, mourning for worlds now dark.

Something of this the gale drew from the pines as it crowded by, but never once did its fiercest gusts disturb the serenity of the sanctuary beneath. A foot or two down from their topmost boughs was shelter for the crows, snugged down on a lee limb, close to the trunk, their feathers set to shed such rain as might strike them, their long black beaks thrust beneath their wings, rocked in the cradle of the deep woods, sung to sleep by their lullaby of the primal universe. There was little need to waste sympathy on them or on any other little folk of the forest who had for their shelter the brooding arms of these beneficent trees stretched above them.

Pines are the great, deep-breasted mothers of the woods, giving food and shelter from sun and storm to all who will come to them. Prolific mothers they are, too, and if man with his axe and his fire would but spare them they would in a generation or two reclothe our Massachusetts waste lands with their kind once more. Recklessly as the generations have destroyed them, sweeping often great tracts bare of every noble trunk, leaving the slash piled high for the fire to complete the destruction of the axe, they still persist, pushing the greenwood with its fluffy plumes right to our dooryards. Let the ploughed field lie fallow for a decade and see them come, loyal little folk preparing the way for them, as the trolls of ancient tales worked for those they loved. Into the brown furrows troop the goldenrod and asters, the wild grasses and brambles making a first shelter for the seeds of gray birch and wild cherry that magically come and plant themselves. A thousand other forms of life, beast and bird and insect, make the place their home; all preparing it for the nursing of the young pines to came. However rough has been the work of the wood cutters, however persistent the forest fires, somewhere is a seed pine standing, ready to spear the turf a mile away with brawn javelins out of whose wounds shall spring trees, just as out of the Cadmus-sown dragon's teeth of old sprang armed men. The tree may be a century-old gnarled trunk, too crooked and knotty to be worthy the woodman's axe, or a verdant sprout of a score of years' standing, green and lusty-the result will be the same. When the seeding year comes the brown cones will open and the winds will bear the germs of the new growth forth, spinning down the gale, whichever way they list to blow. The tiny pines that result may live for three or four years amongst the brambles unnoticed, then suddenly they take heart and grow and we find a lusty forest coming along. At three years they will not be over ten inches high, but they will make ten inches in height the next year, and after the fifth they stride forward like lusty youths, glorifying in their increase. It is not uncommon for them to stretch up three feet a year, more than doubling their height in that sixth year in which they strike their stride. They do not cease this upward striving as long as they live.

After the age of sixty or so the pine may be said to have passed the heyday of its youth, no longer increasing so rapidly in height and girth, yet the increase goes on, if more sedately. The tree rarely reaches a height of more than 160 feet and a diameter of more than forty inches. The largest ever measured by the Forestry Department of the United States was forty-eight inches in diameter at breast high and 170 feet in height, containing 738 cubic feet of wood in its mighty trunk. It will be some time before seedlings in the bramble patch here in Massachusetts reach that size, however, for this tree was 460 years old. It grew among trees of similar age in a pine forest in Michigan.

Yet New England pines have matched it, and more. Writing in 1846, Emerson tells of trees here 250 feet in height and six feet in diameter. One in Lancaster, New Hampshire, measured 264 feet. Fifty years before that trees in Blandford measured when they were felled 223 feet in length. The upper waters of the Penobscot were long the home of mighty pine trees where it was no uncommon thing to hew masts 70 to 90 feet in length. In 1841 one was hewed there 90 feet in length, 36 inches in diameter at the butt and 28 inches at the top. Such trees have passed, now, almost from the memory of living man. Could we have them here in our State they would be worshipped as were the druidical trees of ancient European countries and the place of their standing would be made a park that they might be visited by all, rich or poor. It seems a pity that our ancestors could not have thought of this. It would have been so easy for them to let clumps of these wonderful old pines stand, here and there. It is so impossible for us to bring one of them back, with all our wealth and all our learning.

If we may believe the geologists the pines were the original tree inhabitants of our land, massing it in their dark green from mountain top to sea shore. Suddenly no one knows whence, the oaks and other deciduous trees appeared among them and in part drove them out of the richer soils. "The oak," says Gray, "has driven the pine to the sands." Yet the pines grow equally well among the rough rocks of mountain slopes where the winter gales that wreck the hardwood trees leave them untouched. This is the more strange as pines rarely root deeply. The roots, even of old trees seventy to one hundred feet in height, rarely go into the earth more than two or three feet, taper rapidly and extend not usually over twenty feet on every side. In young trees twenty or twenty-five feet tall the roots do not penetrate more than fifteen or eighteen inches, yet great old trees stand alone in pasture and on hilltop, exposed to all the fury of the fiercest gales, rarely if ever blown down. The structure of yielding limbs that swing so that the gusts glance on their plumes, and the needle-like leaves that let the torrents of air slip through them, is no doubt the reason for this. The outermost pines of the grove shoulder the gale away from the others, yet let it slip by themselves, giving it no grip whereby to tear them up. The resinous roots of the tree not only suffice to hold it upright against the storm, but they last long after the trunk has been cut away. Our forefathers in clear land used to set the uprooted stumps of the pine up in rows for fencing, unsightly barricades that would persist for a century with little sign of decay. On the other hand, wood from the trunk set in the ground soon decays.

Of the great trees centuries old that once clothed our land from Newfoundland to the Dakotas, from northern New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania, few if any remain. Nor shall anyone see their like here again for centuries. But the pines are coming back again to New England. We know their values now as never before and we are encouraging them to reclothe our solitudes both for their commercial and their sentimental value. This last is great and grows greater, nor need one necessarily go into the storm at midnight to appreciate it. One may get some phases of it there, though, that are not to be found elsewhere. My way home through the storm was rough and wet, but it was not lonely. The songs of the pines went with me, especially the tinkling xylophone dance music of the dryad, deep within the ancient trunk.

CHAPTER VI

NANTUCKET IN APRIL

It is fabled that nine hundred years ago the Norsemen riding the white horses of the shoals, dismounted upon Nantucket, its original European discoverers. But this is hardly to be believed, for they did not stay there. Conditions the world over have changed much since the day of the Vikings, but still today he who comes to Nantucket must emulate them, and ride the same white horses of the shoals, for they surround the island and prance for the modern steamer as they did for the long Norse ships with the weird figure-heads and the bulwarks of shields. Blown down from New Bedford by a rough nor'wester we plunged through the green rollers south of Hedge Fence shoals, wallowed among the white surges of Cross Rip, and found level water only between the black jetties of Nantucket harbor, where in the roar of bursting waves the white spindrift fluffed and drifted across like dry snow on a January day.

Within lies the old town, more sedately and unconsciously its very self in April than at any other time of year. The scalloping is done, prohibited by law after the first and the dredges no longer vex the sandy shallows of the land-locked harbor behind gray Coatue. The summer visitor has not yet come and the town is its very, peaceful, indeed slumbrous self. The bustle of the day comes with the arrival of the steamer at four o'clock. From then until darkness falls Main street is busy. The curfew, falling in sweet tones from the old watch tower, voiced by the silver-tongued "Lisbon bell," lulls all to sleep, and indeed long before that only an occasional footfall resounds from the flagging. At seven the same bell rouses all to the morning's leisurely bustle, and again at twelve it rings a noon somnolence in upon Main street that is even more startling to the stranger than the evening quiet.

*****

For the full length of the noon hour one may stand at the door of the Pacific Bank and look down the broad cobble-paved, elm-shaded stretch of Main street to the door of the Pacific Club and be quite deafened by a step on the brick sidewalk and fairly shy at the shadow of a passer, so lone is the place. If it were not for the travelling salesmen, a score or so of whom come in with every boat, flood with their tiny tide the two hotels that are open and ebb again the next morning with the outgoing boat, there were even less visible life at this season. Yet Nantucket has today a permanent population of about three thousand, which is swelled to thrice that number when the summer hegira is at its height. That means, including the island, which is at once all one town and with a few tiny off-shoot islands along its shore, all one county, the only instance in Massachusetts where county and town have the same boundaries.

Geologically Nantucket is a terminal moraine, a great hill of till which the once all-prevalent glacier scraped from the mainland and dropped where it now lifts clay cliffs and stretches sandy shoals to the warm waves of the Gulf Stream. Bostonians who know their geology should feel at home in Nantucket, for, while it is superficially allied to Cape Cod, the pebbles of the stratified gravel on the north being in a large part derived from the group of granite rocks known on the neighboring mainland, perhaps half of the mass being of that nature, the remainder is of the felsite and felsite-porphyries so common in the region about Boston. Here and there are a few big boulders, believed by geologists to have been dropped by stranding icebergs and without doubt natives of Greenland.

The island holds vegetation also imported from far distant areas and established long before man, civilized man at least, came to it.

*****

On favored uplands one finds the Scotch heather and he might think it had been brought by the loving hand of some Scotchman were it not for the fact that the earliest settlers found it here. They came, these earliest settlers, in 1659, Thomas Macy and his wife, Edward Starbuck, James Coffin and Isaac Coleman, a boy of twelve, storm-tossed about Cape Cod and over the shoals, all the way from Salisbury. For them the merrymen breakers on the shoals danced as they do for the incomers of today. They were not sailors, not even the master of the ship. Perhaps that is why they kept on to the end of the two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but surprising on this island.

In these two plants at least east and west stand face to face across Nantucket harbor, the cactus holding the sandspit to the north, the heather on the main island to the south. In April the prickly pear is as ugly as sin to the eye with its lobster-claw growth, uglier still to the hand with its steel-pointed thorns, but later it will put forth wonderful yellow, wild-rose like blooms in rich profusion, making up for all its dourness. Professor Asa Gray, the distinguished botanist of a half century ago, used to say that nothing in the way of plant life could surprise him on Nantucket. Probably this juxtaposition of cactus and heather prompted the feeling.

Nantucket town straggles from beach to hilltop and along shore at its own sweet will, gradually merging into wind-swept moreland on the south and east and west. Here, again, Bostonians should be at home, for the streets grew no doubt from cow-paths winding leisurely from house to pasture, and down them at night, even now, some of them, the cows stray and nibble on the homeward way. I fancy no town so individual in its characteristics still remains in the State. The very pavements smack of it. Here is an old-time cobblestone, then long, smooth stretches of asphalt. Again, just dirt, and the three meet and mingle in stretches long and short, in whose variations one seeks in vain for a reason. So with side-walks, brick passes to flagging, to asphalt, to dirt and back again in the distance of half a block. And even the brick changesoften and suddenly. Here it lies flat, ten feet along it is on edge, perhaps ten feet further on end. A blind man could know his exact location in any part of the town simply by the sound of his own footfall on the sidewalk surface beneath him.

So it is with the houses, and I fancy in this lies one great charm of the town to the city-bored summer visitor. No doubt every old sea dog was his own architect, and the houses show it from main truck to keelson. Yet hardly in a single instance is the result displeasing, within or without, above decks or below. Instead, there is a fine harmony of contrasts that delights while it rests. As for location, it would seem as if each shipmaster, once he had the structure launched, brought her up at full tide and let her lie just where she stranded when the ebb began. So they rest today, jumbled together in friendly neighborliness or slipping down the tide toward the harbor on the one hand and toward the wide high seas of the downs on the other. The town melts into the open either way and belongs to it, merging gently with no possibility of shock or rudeness. So it is with the people, the real Nantucketers. Each intensely individual they yet blend in a wholesome harmonious whole that joins the outside world with little friction. The sailor instinct is strong in them, and they bring their barks alongside the dock or the stranger with a pleasant hail and without a jar.

*****

As the silver-toned Lisbon bell of the Unitarian church tower dominates the sounds of the town so the gilt dome of this church tower dominates the town to the eye of the inbound mariner, as he swings round Brant Point. So, too, in more than one way, since its building in 1810, this strong tower has dominated the home life of the city. Its glassed-in crow's nest has been the city's watch tower for a century and more. And so in a measure it is today. The fire alarm system, now modern and electric, warns of fire by its means, summoning the firemen to boxes by numbers rung. Yet only a few years ago the old tower was literally a watch-tower, occupied always by one of three superannuated seamen who watched for fires, and seeing one rang the bell and shouted the location to the fire department. One stood watch in the glassed-in octagon above. Two sat by the fire and smoked in a room in the belfry below. If the wind was in the east they put the stove pipe out of a hole in the west side of the tower. If it blew from the west the stove pipe was readily changed to a windowpane on the east side. These watchmen were paid $350 a year, practically a dollar a day, and they seemed to have been as efficient as the lately installed electrical appliance.

From the crow's nest to the church roof this old tower is pencilled and carved with the names of Nantucketers, written in for the last hundred years and many an otherwise forgotten man and event is thus recorded for the use of future historians. Yet it is safe to say that no man of all the island dwellers ever did or ever will tread the stairs or look from the octagonal windows with a more intense individuality than that of Billy Clark, Nantucket's town crier, now lamentably dead since 1907. Each afternoon he climbed to the crow's nest with horn under his arm to watch for the daily incoming steamer. He could sight it about an hour before it would dock and as soon as he did the horn blew grandly and his voice rang out over the town in a rhyme, doubtless of his own composing.

Hark, hark, hear Billy Clark,
He's tooting from the tower,
He sees the boat, she is afloat,
She'll be here, in an hour.

And so she would, and before she touched the dock Billy deftly caught a bundle of Boston papers and racing uptown sold them all before the passengers were off the boat, unless they moved quickly. But these were but a few of Billy's multitudinous activities. He cried auctions and sales, entertainments of all sorts and if for any reason a public affair must be suddenly postponed the quickest way to get the news about was to slip a half dollar to Billy who forthwith cried the matter with amazing celerity and vehemence from all the street corners, tooting his horn between whiles to get the attention of all. Weekly or oftener Billy used to cry meat auctions in the lower square, which have always been a Nantucket institution; at these one bids for his first choice of cuts and having bid highest is allowed such portions and such amounts of the "critter" as he pleases.

*****

Billy Clark made much money, as money was reckoned in his day on the island but he had no faculty for keeping it or even keeping account of it. For thirty years his returns for his newspapers sold were made from time to time to the Boston office in, seemingly, such sums as struck his fancy as being appropriate. These were more than adequate for by and by the office sent down word, "Tell Billy Clark for heaven's sake to quit sending us money: He is too far ahead of us."

As might have been expected Nantucket's town crier died poor and would have been in want had not a subscription paper been started for him by the local paper. This, made up in large part by summer visitors and off-islanders, amounted to several hundred dollars, and at the end there were forty dollars left with which to buy him a tombstone. I have not seen this tombstone. It ought to have a horn neatly graven, but I suppose it has not. The town misses him, needs him, more than one citizen says that, but so individualistic a place makes no attempt to get another. There is something of the Quaker idea in that, for though the island was once a great Quaker stronghold few if any of the old sect remain. But it is the Quaker idea. A new town crier will arrive when the spirit moves. Till then the horn is silent. An off-islander might suppose that the town crier was appointed in town meeting as is the fence-viewer, the sealer of weights and measures, the pound-keeper and the hog-reeve. But that is not so. Billy Clark evolved himself, so to speak, and the town patiently waits a second coming.

*****

From the watch tower one looks down many-flued chimneys and sees a score or so of railed-in platforms on the very housetops, often surrounding the chimney. These are the "shipmaster's walks," often known as the "wives' walks." From these one gets a good look off to sea and can readily fancy wives and sweethearts climbing to them to watch for some whaleship that left port perhaps three years before. I fancy them too high, too breezy and too conspicuous for much walking by these. Thence one may see the island round, and get a broad view of the open downs to southward that tempt one to tramp, seeking the edge of the Gulf Stream, led by the steady roar of its breakers pulsing against the clay cliffs. On the downs one gets a sense of the whole of the island as nowhere else. Here it is a ship at sea, unsinkable and steady, blown upon by the free winds of all the world. In the half-gale out of the west I note the smell of the shoals, a suggestion of bilge in the brine, not altogether pleasant. I fancy a heavy sea stirs the slimy depths and brings their ooze uppermost. I had noticed this from an incoming liner's deck when off the lightship before, but charged it to the ship. Now I know it for a strange odor of the sea. It makes me half believe the humorous, oft-told tale of skipper Hackett, who knew his location by tasting the ooze on the tip of the lead. He who

roared to Marden
Nantucket's sunk and here we are
Right over old Marm Hackett's garden.

In a northwest gale the Nantucketer, though far to the southeast, should be able to locate the shoals and steer home by the smell of the wind.

On less uproarious days one gets all along the downs the rich, ozonic odor of the deep sea for a fundamental delight. And always with it are the perfumes of the blossoming land. There is tradition of heavy oak timbers once growing on Nantucket, but only the tradition remains. Here now are low forests of stunted pitch pines, sending their rich resinous aroma on all winds. Arid in late April with these comes the spicy smell of the trailing arbutus, which hides all along the ground among poverty weed, gray cladium moss, and Indian wood grass, sometimes starring the mossy mats of mealy-plum with the pinky-white of its blooms. The mealy-plum itself shows faint coral edging of pink young buds, and here and there a thistle plant, stemless as yet, looks like a green and bristly starfish in the grass. Isolated red cedars on this wind-swept down grow round balls of dense green foliage four or five feet in diameter, looking as if it needed but a blow of an axe at the butt to send them rolling down wind like big tumble weeds. Scrub oaks curiously take the same form, and clumps of bayberry, black huckleberries and sweet fern are often rounded off to hemispheres.

Bayberry and Pitch Pine along a Nantucket Trail

Four silver-toned strokes from the old Lisbon bell in the watch tower warn of dawn in Nantucket in late April. This bell was one of six cast in a Lisbon, Portugal, foundry, intended for a Portugal convent of much renown. In 1812, Captain Charles Clasby of Nantucket visited this foundry, bought the bell, which had not yet been dedicated, sending it to the island in the whaleship William and Nancy, Captain Thomas Cary, and in 1815 it was hung in the tower. Soon after the stroke of four the sparrows begin to chatter, but before long one hears through their uproar the clear whistle of meadow larks. These flit familiarly about the lower levels of the town singing from gate-post or shed-roof all day long and on the downs they vie with the song sparrows in breaking the lone silence of the place. Save for these, a crow or two and the shadow of a sailing hawk, the uplands lack bird life in April.

He who would see birds in plenty, as well as much other wild life, should go over Maddeket way and sit on the shore of Long Pond. There I found the bushy swales alive with marsh birds. Blackbirds gurgled all about. The reedy shallows held many bitterns whose sepulchral "Cahugancagunk, cahungancagunk" sounded ventriloqually from the reeds. Coot, sea duck, loons, black duck, grebes, dotted the surface of the pond and in all the sandy shallows spawning alewives splashed and played-thousands of them. I had thought spawning a serious business with fish, not to be entered upon lightly or without due consideration. Yet these made a veritable romp of it. And in the crystal clear air overhead, swept clean of all city soot, soared a marsh hawk or two and an osprey. There was more than clarity to this atmosphere. It had an elusive, mirage-creating quality that made the osprey look startlingly large as he soared near. It was enough to make one remember the roc that Sindbad saw and get under cover. But he took an alewive instead of me. All along the island in the steep of the sun the air had this magnifying quality. It loomed the white headstones in the cemetery on the hill back of the town till they seemed bigger than the town itself, symbolic perhaps of how large a proportion of its former glory lies here.

A Nantucket Lane

Nantucket's one boat out at this time of year leaves at seven in the morning. From its deck across its churning wake the most conspicuous building is the old watch tower whose gilded dome gleams friendlily. And as the beams of the morning sun strikes this, like the tower of Memnon, it gives forth music, the silver-tongued call of the old Lisbon bell. "Come back, come back," it cadences to all who pass, the melody clinking clear far over the level sea. It seems the spirit of Nantucket born of its warm spring sun, its soft winds and the friendly lives of the islanders themselves, a pleading that echoes long in the memory and that few can resist.

CHAPTER VII

FOOTING IT ACROSS THE CAPE

The Pilgrims might have been envied their discovery of Cape Cod if they had come in the spring of the year. As it was, though they hailed it with joy, it being land anyway, yet they must have found it inexpressibly lonesome and spooky. To the newcomer it is apt to be a ghostly sort of place at any time of year, unless mayhap he be from some similar strand, for its rolling sand hills are swept by winds that wail, and beaten by a sea that grumbles when it does not cry aloud. At the time of year when Standish and his men patrolled its beaches, it is no wonder they saw savages behind every liliputian pitch pine and heard them shouting in the wind and sea. So far as the records go the Icelanders came first of all and Thorfinn Karlsefne, who set sail about 1000 A.D., called the place "Furdurstandir," or wonderstrands, perhaps because of the immense stretches of sea beach along the outside, but quite as likely on account of the mirage which so often greets one in the region thereabouts. A much later explorer tells how the curious atmospheric effects made the land seem to tip up in front of him in whichever direction he walked, making level land and even downhill look like uphill, so uplifting is the Cape air.

Gosnold was perhaps the first Englishman to set foot there, doing it first in 1602 and coming again, as we all must, once we know the region. Gosnold and his men got the eerie feel of the place too when the winter approached. They colonized Cuttyhunk and did very well through the summer, digging sassafras by day and retreating to their fort on the little island in the pond on the bigger island every time the goblins chased them: But the shouting of warlocks in the autumn gales was too much for them and they reembarked for England, glad to get away from the land which was so beautiful and so strange.

A dozen years later came Captain John Smith, who feared neither man nor devil, and who saw nothing unprosaic about the place. As mariner and cartographer to him it was a cape, and nothing more. "Cape Cod," he writes, "which next presents itself, is only a headland of hills of sand, overgrown with scrubby pines, hurts and such trash, but an excellent harbor in all weathers. The Cape is made of the main sea on one side, and a great bay on the other in the form of a sickle. On it doth inhabit the people of Pawmet, and in the bottom of the Bay those of Chawum."

The bottom of the bay means the region of Barnstable and west, and the people of "Chawum" were the Indians of that region. The word sounds dangerous and suggests cannibals, which I do not believe the Indians were, even in those days. Perhaps it refers to their chief, who may well have been an aboriginal Dr. Fletcher. The word "hurts" is more difficult to dispose of but I find it was just his way-and indeed the way of the English of his time-of saying huckleberry. That delectable fruit which is so common on the Cape ought to have a name more significant of its delectability, but perhaps the original sponsors ate it before it was ripe, or too much. Hurts is short for hurtleberry, which is another way of writing whortleberry, the correct old English form which we have since corrupted into huckleberry. That Smith should, have classed the Cape huckleberries as "such trash" is proper cause for a riot.

Two and a half centuries later came Thoreau, the very prince of explorers, for he can take one over well trodden ways and through familiar fields and show him India and the Arctic regions. Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a sand hill. Cape Cod was as full of romance of remote regions as was Concord. He, too, notes the mirage. "Objects on the beach," he says, "whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are. Later, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach fifteen feet high and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it proved to be low heaps of rags-part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel-scarcely more than a foot in height." Thoreau felt the eerie strangeness of beach and sand dunes as all explorers have, and he noted, too, the characteristics of the sand and its vegetation and of the inhabitants with a humorous minuteness. Writing of the dunes, which seem always about to overwhelm Provincetown, he says, "Some say that while the Government is planting beach grass behind the town for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in wheel-barrows, in order to make houselots," which seems characteristic of the beach grass, the harbor and the Cape Cod spirit of making the most of real estate opportunities to this day.

Along a Byway of the Cape

"Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were," he goes on, "by a myriad little cables of beach grass, and, if they should fail would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom. Formerly the cows were permitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of the cable by which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh set it adrift, as the bull did the boat that was moored by a grass rope, but now they are not permitted to wander."

All of which would seem to prove that Thoreau liked to crack a sly joke at the region he loved, as well as do the rest of us. The other day I too crossed the Cape, not exactly in Thoreau's footsteps but through the region of the "Chawums," which, I take it, are the Mashpees of later days. The trail began at East Sandwich where the sandy road crosses the State highway and goes on up the sandhills, always with the blue of the sea teasing from behind the keen javelin of the north wind pushing me on southward. It was wonderful, that blue of the cold, wind-beaten sea. It shone through the maze of mingled twigs for miles till I finally lost it in topping the plateau, passing from loose sand to clayey bottom and fairer growth in moister and more fertile soil. One fascination of the region comes in the fact that in a few rods one leaves all trace of civilization behind, unless one may call the narrow road a trace, and traverses the Cape Cod wilderness for mile on mile, just such a wilderness as Thorfinn Karlsefne may have tramped in armor with spear and crossbow of his day, such as Myles Standish and his men shivered through or Verrazani and Captain John Smith marched over and mapped. Pitch pines, small oaks of many varieties with an undergrowth "trash" of "hurts" and scrub oaks make up the forest which presses narrow cart paths and hangs over them. All the way up the slope the persistent chill of the north wind filled the air with the tonic tang of brine and held back the gray-green mist of leaves that strained at the buds, eager to be out. In hollows the spring had come. On ridges it delayed, finding the auguries unfavorable and waiting a new voice from file altar. But wherever the sun shone in and the wind was stayed it had loosed the butterflies that soared or flitted or flipped about in joy of long awaited warmth. Broad wings of gold-margined, brown Vanessa antiopa soared serenely along under overarching white oaks. "Little Miss Lavender" folded her gray-blue wings in demure beauty on the gray cladium-mossed stumps by the roadside, and dusky-winged species of the skipper brood were agile with new-born life, yet glad to fold wings and sleep in the sun on the road. These were sprites of the deep forest. None were visible in the town margin, though perhaps it was the sweep of the north wind that kept them away. Bird regions, too, showed a definite demarcation. In the orchards and open fields of the town were the home-loving birds, bluebirds, robins, song and other sparrows, swallows, and in the marshes the red-wing blackbirds. Not one of these did I see after leaving the open spaces behind. The avifauna of the scrub-oak underbrush and of the white oak and pitch-pine trees overhead was as distinct as that of a new continent. A flight of pine warblers was on and the oaks and pitch pines were alive with them. The juncos had gone north to nest in flocks of thousands, in a wonder of full song, all eagerly pressing on towards the hills but they left their songs behind them, as it were, to be sung by the other birds. In the pastures and cultivated fields the chipping sparrows, newly arrived from the South, took up the trill with an accent of their own, and all the pine warblers sang it, each with an individuality that slightly but clearly marked him from his fellow. I think all birds show this slight but definite individuality in manner and voice and are probably known to their neighbors of the same clan, as we are, each by his voice. And even so simple and definite a thing as the pine warbler's song may be varied by the individual singer from time to time. I heard one fine bird singing in the stereotyped form. As he sang a flicker flicked in the distance. Whereupon the pine warbler sang again, the same trill but with a tittering twang about it that just jocosely imitated the flicker. I saw no other warbler or other bird near enough to be the beneficiary of this joke. He did it just for himself, and his motions as he flew over to the next tree seemed a visible chuckle that ended in a saucy flirt of the two white tall feathers which are one distinguishing mark of the bird in flight.

Dusty Miller blossoming among the Cape Dunes

Other warblers I noted none. The woods seemed given up for the occasion to Dendroica vigorsi.

The wood warblers disappeared at the border line of the open fields at Wakeby and the home-loving birds appeared again in numbers, robins, bluebirds, swallows and the sparrow kind. The downy woodpeckers and flickers, to be sure, passed to and from both zones, though they, too, seemed to love the trees of the open rather than those of the deeper wood, but in the main the boundary line, as usual, was quite distinctly marked. The noon sun was high and the north wind's chill had been fairly combed out of it by the bristly harrows of a thousand pine tops. In its place was a warm, resinous fragrance, an incense to the season. The heart of the Cape forest is passed at Wakeby and the blue waters of a great lake lap in crystal clearness on the clean sands. The Cape sands are a vast water filter and strain out of the streams all sediment. The ponds are liquid crystals in narrow settings of pale gold.

Someone told me it was only eight miles across the Cape from East Sandwich to Cotuit. Perhaps it is as the crow flies, but I could not clear the scrub as they do and I found the roads adapted to delightful leisure. No wonder the Cape folk do not hurry. How could they? The narrow, gray ribbon of road strolled with me through what seemed eight miles of forest before we reached Wakeby.

Somewhere along there the holly stood green and statuesque in occasional clumps. And thus we fared on to Mashpee. The Mashpees, very mild and genial descendants of the "Chawums," if descendants they are, live quietly in little yellow houses that do not look prosperous, though the children are fat and the elders contented. Modern civilization has reached them in phonographs, bicycles and folding baby-carriages, if the shingles are vanishing from the roof. In 1620 Mashpee was their chief and they lived in wigwams. But the last pure blood died in 1804. Nauhaut, one of the deacons of the Cape Indian church, which seems to have thrived a century or two ago, was the hero of a wonderous snake story which, if it were not about a deacon, one might think apocryphal. I did not see a black snake on the whole journey, but they are common enough even now and were once perhaps much more so. At any rate Nauhaut was attacked by a whole ring of them-so the story runs-which approached him from all sides, the snakes with black heads raised and hissing venomously. Nauhaut with true Indian strategy stool still as they approached, and even when the largest of them twined about his legs and climbed to his neck he made no move other than to open his mouth wide. The chieftain snake thrust his head into this mouth with its glistening white teeth, and Nauhaut immediately bit the head off. Thereupon panic fear seized the other snakes and they fled, leaving the deacon master of the battleground. The Cape grows some big black snakes to this day, but none like those, nor have any later stories appeared to match.

The Cape has informative guide boards, though whether the facts match the information I am not quite so sure. Perhaps, sailor-like, I was circumnavigating Cotuit, beating in, as one might say, instead of sailing directly to port, for I found three guideboards at intervals of a mile or two and each announced with monotonous regularity that it was two and a half miles to Cotuit. When it comes to making statements the Cape guideboards stand loyally by one another. But the little town hove above the horizon at last with its lovely blue bay of warm Gulf-stream water, set in a sweet curve of white sand and backed by neat cottages bowered in green trees. It is worth walking across the Cape to reach Cotuit at the journey's end, but I doubt the eight miles. If it is not fifteen by way of Wakeby, Mashpee, Santuit and the rest I am mightily mistaken.

Thoreau with his usual clear gift of prophecy said of the Cape: "The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway or an ocean of mint julep, that the visitor is in search of-if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport-I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting the sands. Lynn and Nantucket! this bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. What are springs and water falls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the winter is the time to visit it-a lighthouse or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him."

This was all true in Thoreau's day and long after. But the fashionable world has since found the Cape, and brought its palatial hotels and its million-dollar cottages to sit down in friendly fashion among the villagers and share their summer life with them. Thereby both are benefited. But after all the chief charm of the Cape is still that vast stretches of it are as free from fashion as Thoreau said they always would be, and the forests like those Captain John Smith and Myles Standish, Karlsefne and Verrizana traversed still grow there in wide stretches.

CHAPTER VIII

WILD APPLE TREES

Coming back to my pastures after long absence I am always surprised and often otherwise moved at the changes which I can then clearly see have taken place in them. Had I frequented them day by day these would never have appeared to me. Just as in the countenances of one's best friends, seen often, there seem to be no mutations and we need to think definitely of some past period and then to compare the impression with the present one to see that the child is growing up or the old man growing older, so it is with the face of the earth in familiar spots. Young growth comes little by little, shoulders bow day by day in the aged, yet we do not see it when we dwell constantly with them. It is only after long absence that these things suddenly presented shock us with grief in the one case or touch us with pleasure in the other. After a summer's absence, you find baby shrubs grown to youth and youthful trees putting on a greater air of maturity than they had before. Coming back in spring you are apt to sorrow over the wrecks which the winter has wrought. Last winter's gales and deep snows, and more than all the ice storms, have left havoc behind them whereby you may trace their durance and their intensity. Tall birches whose resiliency never before failed them were so bowed beneath these storm burdens that they still remain with upper branches sweeping the ground, like white slaves sculptured in graceful but profound obeisance before a storm king that has long since swept on with all his retinue. It is strange to see cedars that have always seemed unbendable models of primness and rectitude bowed and distorted in groups by the same resistless force. Very heavy and long continuing must have been the ice on these to thus permanently crook their red heartwood. The heavy brand of the Northern winter yet marks them for his own.

Yet the pastures are so glad with May that it is easy to forget sorrow for the passing old in joy over the surgent beauty of new life. It is easy now to believe what the botanists tell us-that flower and leaf are but slightly differentiated forms of the same impulse of growth, grading almost imperceptibly one into the other. With new leaves half-grown, with blossoms bursting, it is hard to tell without close inspection which is which, so tender and rich are the colors which unfold from all buds. The yellow of the dandelion, the blue of wood violets, and the purple of the wild cranesbill are not more delicate, nor are they so rich as the red of the young leaves of the white oaks, now as large as a mouse's ear, which is the Indian sign for the time to plant corn. The blossoms of the berry bushes are no more flower-like than the young leaves among which they grow. The green-yellow of barberry blooms is not more fervent than the yellow-green of the tender foliage, and the two colors blend into one burning bush of cool flame. I do not wonder the summer yellow-bird loves to build his nest in the barberry bush. Its colors at this season are his own.

Other surprises meet men in the pasture this spring. There is a particularly beautiful corner which many city people have come to share with me. On holidays and Sundays they troop to their bungalow on the pond shore by the hundred. Yet they must love barberry bushes and sweetfern, red cedar and white pine, as I do, for they have not intruded upon them, but have let their own presence slip quietly into the vacant places, leaving the original proprietors of the spot unvexed. In this I see a new variety of city man and woman growing up. A score of years ago the advent of such a horde would have meant more disaster than the winter's ice storms could have wrought. Between these more kindly adventurers and the pasture folk have grown up a friendly intimacy which is beginning to teach city ways to the pasture denizens. Therein lies the cause of my surprise. Under the soft mists of a cool May day I brushed the dew from the wood grasses and unrolling croziers of cinnamon fern to pause in admiration at shrubs and trees bearing calling cards. Here is a red cedar announcing on a Dennison tag, "I am Juniperus virginiana, known to my intimates as savin." Out of its nimbus of pale yellow flame "Berberis vulgaris" hands me a bit of pasteboard, and dangling from a resinous bough is the statement that it is "Pinus strobus" that welcomes me to fragrant shade. Like many city manners which are new to country folk these seem to be a bit obtrusive at first. Yet on second thought I find it an excellent custom which ought to be enlarged upon in various ways. I can fancy people coming to the bungalow for a day's intercourse with the pasture shrubs that have never before met them, and feeling awkward and disconcerted at not being able to recall names after a wholesale introduction. I have felt that way myself after undergoing a rapid-fire presentation to a room full of people. If, like the pasture shrubs in this particular corner of the pasture world, all these could have worn a name and address on coat-lapel or corsage, I had come up to the second round able to call each fearlessly by name and oftentimes save mutual embarrassment.

But there are minor considerations, after all. I have an idea that the pasture shrubs may never take kindly to thus carrying conventional calling cards, and that shyer still and more nimble-footed friends will finally relieve them of what wind and rain have left. In a year or two I shall find the cards nameless and built in as foundations of nests of jay birds and white-footed mice, or worked up more skillfully yet by white-faced hornets into the gray paper of their nests. This is a carefully adjusted world and the instinctive movements of all creatures go to the keeping of the perfect balance. The normal attacks the abnormal immediately and all along the line. With shrub or bird or beast to exceed the old-world conventions is to be firmly thrust back into the adjustment or wiped out.

Yet, now and then the balance is not exactly disturbed, but rather readjusted by some alien that seems to find a foothold through all opposition and establishes a place through pure vigor and sweetness of character. Of such is the apple tree that came out of the East with other beginnings of civilization, reaching the shores of Western Europe by way of Greece and Rome. Thence it passed with the early Puritans to New England. A pampered denizen of the orchard and garden for a century or two the tree, so far as New England is concerned, seems to be steadily passing to the wild state. Old orchards grow up to pasture and woodland and the trees of a century ago hold on, if at all, in spite of the encroachments of their surroundings. Thus the best of grafted trees pass to the wild state through decay and regrowth, the strength and sweetness of the wood seeming to bear up against all adversity. The old-time trunk rots away, but sprouts from below the graft spring up and the tree reverts to the primitive in habit as well as surroundings. Or seeds, planted by bird or squirrel grow up in rich, modest humus among rough rocks where never a plough could pass and we have some new variety, a veritable wild apple with no semblance of the original fruit about it but often a delectable, wild tang, a flavor and perfume such as no cultivated variety ever had. No tree gives more beauty to the wildest of New England woods and pastures today than this. Innocent of pruning knife or fertilizer its growth has a rugged picturesqueness about it that makes the well trained tree look pusillanimously conventional beside it. I think the perfume of its blossoms is richer and carries farther and I know the pink of the petals is fairer. The wild apple is the queen of all pasture trees today and does not need to bear a tag for the most citified man, the most boudoir-encysted woman to know it. To get beneath an apple tree, even in the wildest and most unfrequented portion of the pasture or woodland, is to all of us like finding one's roof-tree once more. The race seems to have been brought up beneath it and I take it for a sign of decadence in the New England character that we no longer plant orchards. It is fortunate for us all that the wild creatures are doing what man will not and it may be that their planting will some day give us so beautiful and well flavored a wild apple that we too shall be moved to plant and the country blossom with orchards once more. All the best varieties were thus seedlings originally and have been perpetuated by transferring their buds to the limbs of less valued stock.

Just as in man bone and sinew count really for little and it is only the subtle essence of being, the spirit behind and within, that matters, so it is the sweet and kindly soul within the apple tree that radiates love to all comers. In apple-blossom time the bees will desert all other flowers for them, not because the honey is sweeter or more plentiful within them but because the wooing fragrance has more of a pull on their heart strings than any other. Again in the late autumn they come to the ripe fruit for final winter stores, drawn by the same subtle essence, distilled from disintegrating, pulpy cells. I believe the first cider making was a rude attempt to imprison and perpetuate this charm, rather than to simply make a spirituous liquor. So richly does the apple tree give forth this spirit of generous delight that to all of us the trees seem to brood and radiate a feeling of parental protection. Man often voices this, and in ancient times there were ceremonies which recognized the tree as a kindly deity to whom reverence was done and thanks given. To "wassail" the trees was more than a jovial excuse for cider and song, it had roots in a deeper feeling of reverence and gratitude. But those humbler than men have the same feeling. In the pastures I often find the apple trees literally brooding seedling cedars which seem to flock beneath the outstretched and low-hanging boughs as chickens huddle beneath the mother hen for protection and warmth. Where tender nurslings of this sort are scattered wide in other portions of the pastures to find them grouped here by the score means that some selective thought has brought it all about. I cannot, of course, say that the seedlings consciously choose. Nevertheless, somehow, that spirit of protecting love of which I am, myself, definitely conscious when I come near an apple tree has somehow drawn beneath it these plants of other fibre that need its shelter.

To more sentient beings we may accord a more conscious purpose, and that the wild apple tree is more beloved of bird and beast than any other proves that they, too, feel the brooding charm which radiates from it. Verily, a tree is known by its nests. It seems as if the apple tree took loving thought and prepared especially for certain varieties while welcoming all. The robin loves a solid foundation for the mud bottom and sides of his substantial home. On the level-growing apple tree limb he finds this, and the kindly tree throws out little curved, finger-like fruiting twigs from the sides of its big limbs that help anchor the structure against all winds. Farther up on the limb and near the slenderer tip these curved fruiting twigs multiply and suggest the very shape of his nest to the chipping sparrow who loves to twine tiny roots and grasses, and especially horsehair, among them till his own light, wee structure is as securely placed as the cement bungalow of the bigger bird. So, too, the tyrant flycatcher loves to build his larger nest, often interwoven with waste string till it looks as if he had tied it on. He seeks the very tip of the level limb and the blunt, sturdy, spreading twigs invite his confidence as they do that of the chipping sparrow. This bold exposure of eggs and nestlings invites thieving jays and murderous crows, hawks and owls, but the king-bird's dinner flies by while he waits, and he does police duty while he watches for it. He is rightly named and no marauder dares approach while he sits dominant on the topmost bough. He is guardian thus of his less belligerent neighbors.

The oriole, trained in tropic woodlands to avoid climbers, instinctively finds the pendulous tips of slender elm boughs the best place for his nest, yet often in apple-blossom time he becomes so enamored of them that the white snow of their falling petals leaves him building on the twigs from which they scatter. In July the incessant, cry-baby twittering of the young orioles is thus as common a sound of the orchard and pasture as it is of the elm-shaded street. Other apple tree nest-hangers are the vireos, yellow throated, red-eyed and white-eyed, all of whom love to build on the low-swinging tips of the benedictory limbs. It seems to me that no other tree attracts such a variety of beautiful birds out of what one might think to be their usual environment. Of these I may cite the scarlet tanager and the rose-breasted grosbeak, both rather shy woodland dwellers, the tanager the friend of the tall timber, the grosbeak partial to sprout land and second growth, but both often found building their nests on the inviting boughs of apple trees not far from their favorite haunts.

It seems, too, as if the tree made especial preparation for the housing of other less shy folk. I know no other tree so nobly hollow-hearted. At little excuse, if it be not good will toward woodpeckers, bluebirds and their like, the mahogany-like dense heart-wood rots, leaving hollow passages in the trunk and larger limbs, and often in the smaller ones, too. Here are homes for all who seek complete seclusion from storms and enemies. The little screech owl loves these hollows more than those of any other tree, and sings his little quavering night song from the dusky tops, while his mate and her eggs are safely hidden in the blackness of the hollow below. The downy woodpecker bores his nest hole in the softened heart-wood of upright limbs and pays for his lodging by devouring all grubs and borers that otherwise might make his house fall too soon. The bluebird finds his dwelling ready made, lower down, often in a horizontal limb, having neither strength nor inclination to bore for himself. The flicker, too, loves the apple tree and bores his own hole in upright limbs, as does the downy woodpecker, often with much noise and obtrusion of vigorous chips.

Nor need the list stop here. The red squirrel and the gray, the bat, the field mouse and the white-footed mouse all feel this welcoming charm, this endearing hospitality of the wild apple tree, whether born wild or grown wild through neglect, and go to it for protection, for food, for a home, or just because, like man, they love it and feel sweetened and heartened in its presence.

Soon now the snow of falling petals will whiten the ground beneath all wild apple trees, carrying an inexpressible purity and fragrance to the rich wild earth beneath. Whither these melt it is hard to say. They whiten the ground for a few brief hours and are gone. I can fancy the wee sprites of earth in whatever form they happen to dwell at the moment, beetle or bumblebee, eft or elve, gathering these eagerly by scent and by sight, to store them away below ground for slow transmutations of their own. If wrapped in bed-clothing like this it is no miracle that rough grubs should come forth gauzy winged and beautiful insects that flit by and delight the eye of the naturalist. If fed upon these it is no wonder that summer wild flowers of the deep woods can show us delicate tints and woo us with dainty perfumes, the very memory of which is happiness for long after. Thus the tree makes kindly messengers of even the rough winds of March that sometimes charge back upon us for a day, obliging them to carry the very essence of the gentle good will and fondness of the spring farther than it might otherwise reach and finally bidding them faint and die for very love of the perfume and beauty they bear. Thus the wild apple tree, still the brooding mother of all woodland things, sends fragrant love and kindness questing far through the rougher woodland till its gentle spirit seems to imbue all things. In all the pastures there is none like it.

CHAPTER IX

MIDSUMMER MOONLIGHT

All through the afternoon of the fervent July day I could see the sun sifting and winnowing his gold for the sunset. All the morning his alchemic forces had been quietly transmuting gray mists of midnight, vapors from damp humus, moisture from lush leaves and I know not what other pure though common elements into the precious glow that began to haze the west soon after noon. The old belief that the alchemist at his utmost cunning could recreate rose blooms from their own ashes had sure foundation. I have seen the sun do it every June in countless gardens where, out of this same humus and soft rains, his potency works the transmutation as if in a night. So on July days this father of transmuters melts in his crucible, of which the earth under our feet seems always the very bottom of the bowl, many ingredients, and distils from them this pure gold. Soon after he passes the meridian you may see it sprinkled lavishly from zenith to horizon, and as the day wanes it gilds all sordid things with the glow of romance. By it we get the clearer vision and have thoughts of the unseen things which are eternal. The trouble with sordid souls, if such there be, is that they have never seen enough sunsets. People who live in places or palaces where these are never seen have need to be born of noble fathers and sweet mothers, to be carefully nurtured in hope and aspiration and belief, or the world is the worse for them.

Long after the sun had gone and the evening was cool with unclotted dew, the fires of the melting burned high in the upper air and the gold that had been thin vapor seemed to condense into clouds that glowed copper-red with the molten metal and cooled and dropped into the distant hills. No wonder the miners go ever westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and into the canons just beyond.

Usually it is not until the gold begins to pass that I notice the nighthawk, though he may have been circling and crying "peent, peent" all the afternoon. If you can catch sight of him before the light fades too much you will see the white bar which crosses each wing beneath and looks exactly like a hole, as if the bird had transparencies in his pinions as has the polyphemus moth. Many a summer afternoon I have seen nighthawks circling erratically above Boston Common, and there their cry has sounded like a plaint. No doubt these birds fly there by choice and bring up their young on the tops of Back Bay buildings because they prefer the place, but this has not prevented a tinge of melancholy in their voices. Like many another city dweller they may take habit for preference, but the longing for the freedom of the woods, though unconscious, will voice itself some way. The nighthawk's cry, falling from the high gold of the waning sunset to dusky pasture glades, has no note of melancholy but a soothing sleepiness about it that makes it a lullaby of contentment. I rarely hear him after dark. I fancy he goes higher and higher to keep in the soft radiance of the fading glow. Only once have I ever seen one sky-coasting, falling like a dark star from a height where he seemed but a mote in the gold, a smaller, point that the green glint of a real star that had just come through. It was as if his wings had lost their hold on the thinner air of this remote height. He half shut them to his body and dived head foremost on a perilous slant. Then, just as he must be dashed to pieces on the gray rock of the ledge on which I sat, he spread them wide, caught the air that sang through the wide-spread primaries with a clear, deep-toned note, and rose again; and in his "peent, peent" was a quaint note of self-satisfaction and self-praise.

The Sun sifting and winnowing his Gold for Sunset

It is customary to ascribe actions of this sort on the part of a bird to a desire to please and astound the mate who is supposed to look on with fervent admiration. Sometimes this may be the case, but I think more often the bird, like my nighthawk, does it to please himself. There was no mate in sight when this nighthawk did his sky coasting, nor did any appear afterward. It was after the mating season and I think the bird did it in just pure joy in his own dare-deviltry. He liked to see how near he could come to breaking his neck without actually doing it. In the same way a male woodcock will keep up his shadow-dancing antics long after the nesting season is over, and the partridge drums more or less the year around. The other bird may have much admiration for these actions if she sees them, but never half so much as the bird who performs. Nothing could equal that.

The most beautiful moonlight nights we have are those on which the moon is an hour or two late. Then we see the day merge into real darkness as velvety shadows slip quietly up out of the earth and dance together. These congregated under the pines at first, last night, and waited a bit before they dared the shelter of deciduous trees. Long after that they huddled on the margins of the open pasture as bathers do on the pond shore when the water is cold, seeming to put dark toes into the clear light and then withdraw with a shudder. When they all went in I do not know, for I was watching the sky. By and by I looked back at the pasture and the open places in the wood, and all alike were filled with a wavering crowd that seemed to trip lightly and noiselessly as if in a minuet. Little by little they blotted out familiar outlines till only the tallest of pines looming dark against the lighter horizon had form. All else was a void, not that of chaos but a soft cosmos of completion.

Sunrise over the Pond

It is singular how long one may look at this complete darkness and not note the dancing lights in it. After you see them, the glint of the fireflies flitting hither and thither, starring the meadows as thickly as distant suns star the sky, making a milky way of the brookside and flashing comet-like along the dry upland, is singularly vivid. They sparkle, these northern fireflies of ours, with a dainty glint that merely emphasizes the darkness. Now and then you may see the larva of one of these, which is the glow-worm beside the path. You may get a very faint real illumination from him, lighting perhaps the space of your fingernail as he crawls along. He, too, merely serves to make the darkness visible. The firefly of the tropics is more spectacular. He blazes forth like a meteor, setting all the thicket aglow for a moment. The lights of our fireflies are more like a frosting of the darkness, as when the moon shines in winter and the light glints from ice crystals hung on the frozen grass. I like ours best.

The herald of the moon is the whippoor-will. I do not recall hearing him sing on pitch black nights. Starshine is enough for him, but I am convinced that he is only half nocturnal and that he watches for signs of moonlight as eagerly as I do. Last night I saw the glint of it in the upper sky an hour before the moon rose, a silvery shine which did not touch the lower atmosphere, but shot athwart the higher stars like a ghost of aurora. The whippoor-will saw it, too, and began his call, which I do not find a melancholy plaint, but rather an eager asking. It was a voice of shrill longing, sounding out of luminous loneliness after the moon began to silver all things. Slowly, like a benediction, this silvery luminosity descended till it touched the tops of eastward hills with the softest imaginable glow and filled all the sky above them with light. The glow of the sun drives the darkness before it and then appears. The glow of the moon is so much the more gentle in that it fills the world with radiance and leaves the darkness, which it permeates, but does not destroy. It is a newer evangel, which does not seek to rebuild the world, but simply takes it as it is and fills it with clear fire, adding to its rough vigor purity of motive. I do not see how anyone who loves moonlight can be bad, or even morose and melancholy. Its light drowns all these in a deep sea of peace.

As the moon came up, gibbous and glowing, its beams seemed to skim into the darkness under the pines as a swallow flies, scaling along beneath the blackness of close-set plumes above, to light long aisles between the naked boles below. These that had been so invisible before that I had to find my way among them by the friendly leading of the path beneath my feet, now took on a radiance of their own. Green and brown no longer, they glowed with the witchery of the level light, their real colors only shining faintly through this transparent frosting, this veneer of cool fire, till the place was like those European salt caverns of which one reads where the dark roof is upheld by crystalline pillars that give ghostly reflections of the lights that the miners carry. Here, groping in the grotesque glow of their own lanterns might well come the gnomes of German tales although, so sweetly gentle is the light, I can think of them only as kindly goblins bent on quaint deeds of goodness.

Beyond the pines the path led me moonward through glades among deciduous trees, no doubt the abodes of elves. That may have been but a sphinx moth that flew down the path before me, his fat gray body silvered by the moonlight, his short, narrow wings beating so fast that they became but a gauzy nimbus about him, or it may have been Puck, training to put that girdle round about the earth in forty minutes. Here invisible creatures scurried away from a fairy ring whose flagging is of round pyrola leaves, lighted by ghostly white candelabras of the waxy blooms, field mice, very likely, or black beetles, or elves dancing in the moonlight about their queen. How am I to know which? Surely if elves dance anywhere it is on midsummer nights like this when the dew has clotted on all the leaves till they are pearled with a soft green fire as if from caverns under sea and I walk down the path through such caves and among such kelp and corals as a merman might. All about me I hear the stirring of the little people and now and then soft airs fanned from invisible wings touch my cheek. It may be moth, or bat, or tricksy Ariel for all I know or care, such glamour does the haunted air throw about him who will leave the brown earth behind and plunge in its silvery depths.

Pushing aside tapestries woven of such figures as these on a cloth of white silver, I stepped out of the wood on to the shore of the unruffled pond. Here a man might well pause and take no further step lest he fall into the blue depths of space. The moon hangs like a great shield in a sky of soft sapphire, piled with luminous figures. Within the wood are fairy and elf, goblin and gnome, half seen in the filmy light. Here giant genie stand revealed, passing in the dim perspective of mighty distances or leaning portentously from the radiant sky. In the mirror-like pond I see all these things repeated in an underworld that is as distinct and clear, yet strangely distorted. The miles of soft blue distance that stretch invitingly upward to the withdrawn stars of the zenith, stretch as soft and blue, but fearsomely deep beneath my feet to the nadir. Standing at the water's rim I am on the verge of a vast, deep gulf that no plummet might fathom, into which at another step I shall begin to fall, and once falling fall forever, for there is no bottom. It is all very well to say to one's self that an inch below the mirroring surface lies the good gray sand which was there by daylight. The midsummer moon is past the full and things are as they seem.

Rounding the Breakwater at Nantucket within the Call of the Old Lisbon Bell

By midnight the white genie of the sky had stalked off beyond the horizon out of sight. The moon that had been so great among them with its rim touching the eastern hills that it was like a great map of itself hung on the margining sky, had concentrated to a ball of white light near the zenith. Back in the wood I found the invisible little people out in full force, rustling, flitting and calling. But the white light had gone and under thick foliage of deciduous trees the real night had come again, dappled, indeed, by flecks of filtered moonlight which dazzled and made the shadows more obscure. In the depths of the pines the veritable darkness of Egypt smothered all sight. Here the path must be found by the feet alone, and it is singular what potency of understanding thrills up from the good brown earth through the boot-soles when it is needed. Every footpath is a shallow canal through which you flow as does water if you will but let it lead you. If the foot fall but a little to the right or left of the wonted spot some slight inequality of the earth that in the full daylight would never reach your senses, now sends definite messages to you. By it you swing with certainty to the right or the left and find the next footfall near enough within the narrow way to continue the guidance. No matter how winding the path, it will keep you within its borders if you will but give up your will to it.

Stepping from this Egyptian shadow of the pines to the full glare of midnight on the brow of the hill was like having a searchlight thrown on you. All things gleamed in a white radiance which had rainbow margins where the dew hung heaviest on nearby objects.

By day in this spot the eye is photographic and records every detail, by night you have the same story told again by the brush of an impressionist. It is the reverse with sounds. In the full glare of the sun the myriad voices of the world mingle in a clear roar that is a steady musical note, and soon you forget to hear it. By night each noise is individual, and leaves its impress on the mind. Whoever remembers the quality of noises he hears by day in the city, however great the uproar? Who can forget the soothing chirp of crickets in the grass at his feet by night?

Standing on a hilltop on such a midnight a man may map the watercourses, large and small, for miles around, though by day he can see from the same place no glint of water. Here is a deep lake of white fog which marks a marsh, and into it flow winding streams that are level with the treetops on the margin. Here the moon by night is distilling and vatting mountain dew from which all wild creatures may drink deep without fear of deleterious effects. It is the cup that cheers and does not inebriate. The waking robins tipple on it and sing the more joyously, nor is there in their midday any of the moroseness of reaction.

Three hours later the moon had slipped down from the zenith into cushions of velvety, violet black, low in the western sky. Its bright white glow was lost in part and it was haloed with a yellow nimbus of its own fog distillation. Over on the margin of the pines the little screech owl, now full of field mice and having time to worry, voiced his trouble about it in little sorrowful whinnies. Down in the pasture a fox barked distinctly and a coon answered the plaint of the screech owl in a voice not unlike his. It always seems to me that the night hunters of pasture and woodland bewail the passing of such a night as much as I do. The whippoor-will began to voice his petulant wistfulness again. He had been silent for hours, feasting I dare say on myriad moths and unable to call with his mouth full. The whippoor-will chants matins as querulously as he does vespers. Far in the east the stars that had been gleaming brighter as the moon descended paled again. The night in all its perfect beauty was over, for into the shrill eagerness of the whippoor-will's call cut the joyous carol of a dawn-worshipping robin.

CHAPTER X

TURTLE-HEAD AND JEWEL-WEED

In my town, summer, whom the almanack calmly orders out on August 31st, refuses to be evicted in person and lingers serenely while the furniture is being removed, often until late September. In these September days I think we love her best, perhaps because we know that soon we shall lose her, and already the parting has begun. It is not that certain flowers that came joyously in June are now but dry bracts and seed pods. She has given us other beauties and fragrance to take their places. It is rather that summer herself is gently breaking with us, giving us the full joy of her warmth through the day, but discreetly withdrawing at nightfall and lingering late in her own apartments of crisp mornings when there is a tonic as of frost in the air, whereby October woos us.

The garnishings of her house are hardly fewer while the moving van people are so busy, and I am apt to delight in them all up to the very moment when the sweepers, the autumn winds, come and brusquely brush them out. Old man Barberry is very happy at this time too. Since he hung out his queer smelling pale gold pendants in late May he has shown no touch of color, but has wrapped himself stoically in sober green and waited, as old men know how to do. Now his day has come again and he is very brave in rubies that fringe his dull attire and make him flash fire in the sun from head to foot. Slender goldenrod girls and blue-eyed aster children, trooping along the fields and over the hills, holding up the train of summer as she walks so sedately, think him adorable. If summer stops but for a moment I see them slipping slyly into his arms, laying golden heads on his drab waistcoat and gazing with wonder-blue eyes at his coruscating gems. I think well of old man Barberry, too; better I fancy than he does of me. I admire his stocky growth which has a sturdy grace of its own, and I love him for the birds that he shelters, the yellow warblers that love to build their cottony nests in his arms. But he was born in the pasture long before I was and he usually resents my advances. His trident spines have a sarcastic touch that tingles, and with them he bids me keep my distance. But he is a wise old man in his love for gentle beauty and he makes a fine picture of gold and green, ruby fire and tender blue as he folds all these youngsters in his embrace. Those spines he must fold very close, even to the withdrawing of them into his orange colored cambium layers, for there is never an ouch from the group.

These are summer's flowers for remembrance, the goldenrod and asters. She gives them to us and goes, making all early autumn glow with her memory thereby. But old man Barberry may have these if he will. I like best to remember her by others less common and less permanent, flowers of shy dignity that begin to think of departure when summer does, and vanish with the flash of her trailing garments. Two of these, the turtle-head and the jewel-weed, are little known to careless passers, and elderly pasture shrubs have no chance to lure them with Attleboro jewelry. They have their abode in cool springs in seclusion behind the pine-clad hillside, and would, I fancy, be ashamed to be seen wandering wantonly about the open fields. I have to make pilgrimage to their home in the middle of the fountain head marsh to meet them, nor are their real beauties revealed to one who carelessly splashes in. Instead, he is liable to be mired in black mud and see nothing so good as his way out again, nor will he even notice the elfin laughter of black crickets and green grasshoppers who rub their preposterously long hind legs together in glee at the joke, so eager will he be for dry land.

The right of way leads over a level, firm trunk of a fallen tree, one that has been so long down that only a mossy ridge indicates its existence, to a sphagnum mound which tops a stump as old as the causeway. A swamp maple grows at this stump as a back for my seat in this reception room of the jewel-weeds. I think it is the sway of the slender maple that puts me in rhythm with the mood of the place and gives me eyes to see things as they are, for after a little the rough swamp snarl of straggling growth unravels itself, and things stand revealed.

There is the rough bedstraw. Somebody who saw it first shall burn for calling such a sweet little plant such a mischancy name. I protest that the bedstraw is worthy a better. To be sure it is rough. The prickles that line the edges of its stems all point back, and while they do not wound they hold you tenaciously when you touch them. Thus the plant clings to other woodier stems and climbs vicariously. But why bedstraw? I trust that none of the people who came out of the ark and set about naming things as they followed had to make bedding of these rough stems. With the whorls of slim green leaves that climb with the slender stalks the plants make lace and a green mist all about, underfoot in the marsh, lace that drapes tall plants to which it clings, a green mist out of which shine constellations of tiny star blooms. Picking these constellations to pieces one might place a hundred of the tiny, four-pointed stars on a copper cent and never overlap the petals, yet they shine above the green as Orion and Cassiopaea do over the frost fog of a winter night, they are so vividly white.

I never see this at first. It is only after the tranquillity of the place has shrunk my unwieldy bulk to the patient potency of the tiny herbs themselves that I have the sight. It is admirable, this potent patience of these wee things that are born in bogs yet in their own world grow stars the memory of which lasts as long in the consciousness of man as does that of the Pleiades. If you pluck them you will see by turning them over that these constellations are as whitely bright to small eyes that look from below, from the ooze of the bog or the roots of marsh grass, as they are to our great eyes that look from above. Of an early September morning in the clear stillness I feel that they loom like varnished planets of the sky in their own lowly heaven of coruscating dew that coats all things with a milky way of white fire drops, a dew that has risen all night from the warmth below and, chilled by the cold blue void of space, has hesitated on every leaf and twig, frightened into immobility; infinitesimal drops as shining white and as close together as the stars in a winter night sky. At dawn all the bog world is crusted with this dew.

A great gravelly hill rises abruptly from the southern edge of this boggy home of shy plants, clothed with century old pines. These are so high and so dense that the sun's rays cannot come through with any directness, instead they are so filtered and reflected from gloss of leaf and gray of trunk that they have no power to dry up this dew, they simply light it up, nor can the little morning winds that play at surf bathing in the pine tops, dancing hand in hand, ducking with little shouts of laughter and singing songs learned from the roar of breakers on gray rocks, come down to drink them up; so the stars of this under-forest heaven remain to keep the bedstraw constellations company until nearly noon. By way of the lower heaven of bedstraw blooms the eye rises easily to the forest of jewel-weeds. These at least are rightly, if unconsciously, named. It is not only the bloom but the whole weed that is a jewel when the morning sun is low and the reflected light slides level into the forest among purple stems that shoal into transparent green as they slender toward the leaves. These, too, seem transluscent and glow, and then some sprite seems to have suddenly turned on the jewels. Strange that they did not flash to my eyes even before I came to the place, on my way down the hill. Perhaps it is some trick of light and shade that makes them flash on at a certain time and glow like transparent gold shot through with light. No jeweller could make these: they are such as a fairy prince might, hang on the pale green breast of a dryad, a nuptial gift of surpassing value out of fairy coffers.

At the thought I see more clearly still and each plant becomes a slender personality of the forest, a nymph whose purple life-blood runs clear in delicate veins under a skin of transluscent green. Out of what trees they stepped seems not difficult to tell. Surely this one came down out of a pasture elm to bathe slim feet in the cool spring water. Here are smaller, more slender creatures that came from white birches, and that group of stately ones stepped out of the tall white pines that stand on the slope nearby. No wonder the other creatures of the glade adore these slim green dryads of the swamp. The misty green bedstraw fawns about their feet and makes lace for their gowns. The polygonum blushes pink and stretches long arms toward them. The white alders, to whose tips beauty and fragrance still cling bend over them and toss white petals and perfume their way, while even the homely bur-marigold seems to glow a little better yellow in fondness, though it very properly keeps its distance. Rough rushes nod three-cornered approval and I am sure the spinulose wood ferns crowd down into wetter spots than anywhere else, just to get sight of them. In fact they stand in such wet ground that you might think them Nephrodium cristatum instead of Nephrodium spinulosum were it not for the delicate fringing of their fronds which no other fern can equal. While these things happen I think I can see the dryads quiver with delight and their jewels dance and flash, living creatures rather than gems. Surely if anyone may wear living jewels it should be dryads. They have a trick of facing you, these jewels, and looking like golden butterflies just spreading petal wings for a flight. At such times I am minded not to move suddenly lest they go off over the treetops like a flock of goldfinches. If they should I should not be surprised. With a change of light or position they change appearance again and become tiny gold dragons, winged dragons with gaping mouths and little keen brown eyes that size you up. Again each is but an ear-pendant, beaten of thin gold hanging beneath the shell-green ear of the dryad.

All these are early morning fancies, born, I dare say, of the fine flavor of the place, drunk in dew. At noon, when the sun shines direct into the marshy glade, the dryads have gone back into their trees for a noonday nap and the jewel-weeds are but weeds after all, though beautiful ones. Bees come sailing along and plunge at the open cornucopia of the lower petal, which was the very dragon's mouth, after the honey in its tip. Honey bees would find ready entrance, but the burly bumblebees are far too fat. These light on the lip, through inherited habit, no doubt, but immediately turn to the recurved honey-holding tip and plunge the proboscis through its slender texture, stealing the honey from flower after flower. In a day's watching I have seen only bumblebees gathering honey from these flowers, and I wonder about the fertilization which certainly requires that insects should go in and out at that open dragon mouth, not little chaps, but buzzy, fuzzy creatures that will brush off the pollen and carry it.

Captain's Hill from Marsh Margin

I have no doubt about the bumblebees and the turtle-heads. Each vivid white corolla of the groups that stand so stiffly on the ends of the long stalks seems especially made for a bumblebee. He goes into it as a hand into a glove, flattening himself amazingly for the entrance, but finding room to work in the interior, though not enough to turn about in. On his way in, what pollen he already may have collected on his furry back slips easily off on the very lip of the stigma which waits at the strategic point with the antlers crowding well forward, but firmly held a hair's breadth behind it. Thus each bloom is fertilized with the pollen from some other, insuring cross-fertilization. The bumblebee takes his toll in honey, but when he comes to back out he has trouble. If you will listen close by you will hear him buzzing and burbling like an overheated teakettle as he struggles. The arching filaments of those fuzzy stamens have tangled his short legs and he is shaking the pollen out of the antlers all into the fur of his yellow overcoat. Before he gets out he is right mad and loaded with pollen for the fertilization of the next bloom. He comes squeezing out, as flat as a pancake, sharp end first, and though I watch close by I am very respectfully motionless. But he gets all over it by the time he has flown to the next bloom and his hum as he prods his way in has the tone of a cheerful "Good morning."

The turtle-heads have none of the frail loveliness of the jewel-weeds that suggest half-visible dryads, but they have a stanch beauty of their own which I think makes them seem very comely. Each corolla is a smooth, opaque white through which no light may pass. It is easy to know how it looks inside a jewel of the jewel-weed. From without the imagination can appreciate that glow of pale gold which must there suffuse all things. To such tiny midges and beetles, spiders and moths as may enter it must be like walking about in the heart of the Tiffany yellow diamond. The bumblebee might tell how it seems in the turtlehead petal, if he knows. I fancy, however, he is so everlastingly busy and so mad with the filaments when he is inside that he has no time to think of atmosphere. Often the pure white of this flower is tinged with a soft shading of delicate rose near the tip of the petal. It is an unobtrusive shading, as shy as the bloom itself. Ashes of roses might describe the tint better, for it is as gentle as the fading pink of a sunset sky, a shade that has dropped thence to the lips of these blossoms hiding in the dusk of the swamp. You see it best by looking close into the very face of the flower as the bumblebee does when about to alight on it, and I think it is set there to show him the way. By the time he has seen that, he is near enough to be drawn by the faint but ravishing perfume which is breathed out by the flower. It is so faint that you must come like the bee to the very lip of the corolla before you will find it. It is so tender and of such refinement that when once you get it you will think no blossom has its equal. The white alder at this time of year is prodigal of rich and delectable odors. The jewel-weed with all its beauty has none that my sense can perceive. But that of Chelone glabra, as modest and withdrawn as the flower itself, seems hardly to belong in the swamp for all the beauty of the place. It should rather be that of some delicately nurtured plant, some rare orchid of sheltered conservatories, it is so delicate and delightful.

The jewel-weed is as frail as a dream for all its vigorous growth which reaches sometimes six feet. If you pluck it it withers before you can get it home to put in water and its jewels shrivel to nothing on the way. Turtle-head is far different and I like it for its sturdiness, but most of all I like it because it is the hast of a small friend of mine, the Baltimore butterfly. In summer you may see this little fellow, a plaid of yellow and orange on black, the Baltimore colors, whence his name, flitting about, never far from the place where the turtle-head grows. If you see one you may be almost sure that the other is nearby. I have not seen the butterfly for many weeks, but among the stalks of Chelone I find the webs which shelter its children. These tiny caterpillars will feed on the leaves till winter, then by some witchery of nature survive the frost and snow and zero weather, sheltered only by this filmy, flimsy home, finish their growth in the spring, waxing fat on the young leaves and by late May be floating about, more Baltimore butterflies.

There can be no better evidence of the witchery and romance of the place than this, that these frail pulpy creatures should with no covering worth the name withstand cold that under similar conditions would kill me before Christmas time. When I think of this dreams of dryads that troop down from the hillsides and stand, slender and adorable jewel-weeds, where the cool springs ooze from beneath the gravelly hill, do not seem in the least absurd or improbable.

CHAPTER XI

THE WAY OF A WOODCHUCK

The memory of my first glimpse of a woodchuck always reminds me of an old story which needs to be retold that it may point my moral even though it does not adorn my tale.

A minister, supplying for a time in a country parish, took a pleasant path through the fields to the church of a Sunday morning just before the service. There he found a boy digging most furiously in the sandy ground.

"My lad," said the minister, in kindly reproof, "you ought not to do this on Sunday morning unless it is a labor of necessity."

"I don't know nuthin' about necessity," replied the boy without stopping for a moment, "but I've got to get this woodchuck. The minister's comin' to dinner."

Nobody has ever told whether the boy-and after him the minister-got the woodchuck or not, but there is at least an even chance that he did not, for a woodchuck in sandy ground will move on into it, taking his hole with him, at a rate that has defied more than one industrious pursuer. Just how he breathes while this is going on is more than I know, for he fills the passage behind him with the debris of his digging, but he evidently does find air enough, for after tiring out the excavating hunter and waiting a reasonable time he digs up and out and proceeds to the deglutition of kitchen gardens with an artistic thoroughness that has been his since days of the Pilgrim Fathers, and I will not undertake to say how long before that. I do not doubt that the first Indian that ever planted corn and beans and "iskooter-squashes" said the same things about the woodchuck that I do, in his own language; and I believe that the woodchuck then, as he does now, just wrinkled his stubby black nose and retired to his burrow to sleep upon it while the garden digested.

No one to look casually at the woodchuck would think he was hard to get, but he is. The first time I ever glimpsed one I learned that. The woodchuck was eating second-crop clover in a hayfield that had been mown about three weeks before. A little cocker spaniel and I were strolling in the field when suddenly we heard a squeal that was shrill enough to be a whistle and a fuzzy brown blur streaked for the stone wall, followed by another. The cocker spaniel had decided, like that boy, that he had got to get the woodchuck. I fancy he thought he had him when they came together about five feet outside the crevice in the wall for which the woodchuck had made his fuzzy bee line, but as a matter of fact the woodchuck got the first grip. His long yellow incisors met in the cocker's shoulder and that worthy gave forth a yelp of pain and indignation as the battle began with that strange hold.

I wish I might describe the Homeric conflict that followed, but it was too full of action for anyone to grasp the details. A furry pinwheel revolved in varying planes, smearing the stubble with gore and filling the air with cries of mingled pain and defiance, for what seemed to an astounded and perturbed small boy a good part of the afternoon. Most of the gore and all the cries came from the dog, for the woodchuck fought in grim silence, though no whit more pluckily than his opponent. In the end the dog won, but he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces him to do battle.

But I have never known a woodchuck to do battle that was not forced upon him. In point of fact he is one of the most home-loving, peaceful animals I have known. He is the original home-body and if the market where he is forced to seek supplies is not near enough to his home he moves the home nearer the market. In that often lies his undoing. His safety is in the woodland border or in the far pasture stone wall. There if he would content himself with aromatic barks and wild pasture herbs he might dwell unharmed of man, who is his chief enemy. But he loves the clover field, and often his first move toward disaster is coming up from the pasture wall and digging a burrow in the midst of the clover where he soon has regular paths which take him from one rich clump to another. After that he sniffs the kitchen garden, and the descent to Avernus is easy. He moves in to the borders, finds a crevice or digs a hole, and revels. Nor does he recognize the place as Avernus-which it is bound to be sooner or later-but spells it Olympus in very truth. Man may be the devastator of the earth, and he certainly is so far as its wild life is concerned, but as a producer of succulence in the kitchen garden he is a deity before whom any woodchuck must fall down and worship.

For the woodchuck besides being the original home-body is without doubt one of the founders of vegetarianism. Born in the desert places, feeding on locust bark and wild honeysuckle, he added inches to his girth when he learned that red clover which the early settlers kindly brought with them had a nourishing quality that defies competition. A woodchuck can get so fat on clover that by November, when he retires for the year, he is as near a complete globe as anything with feet and a face can ever be. The convexity begins at his eyebrows above, at his chin beneath, and though he has feet, they have the effect of being merely pinned on to the lower hem of his garment, as those of a proper young lady in our grandmother's day were supposed to be. The woodchuck can get no fatter than that on garden truck, but he likes it better. I doubt if Charles Dickens ever saw the animal, but when he created Mr. Wardle's fat boy he might well have taken him for a model. "D-n that boy," says Mr. Wardle, "he's asleep again." That was when he had ceased eating, and so it is with the woodchuck. In the early dawn when the dew is on the lettuce, he takes his toll of the bed, seasoning it with a radish and a snip at a leaf or two from the herb bed. But such are mere appetizers for the feast. The next course is the peas. He can go down a row of peas that are about to set their flat pods swelling to become fat pods and eliminate everything but a stubble of tough butts that have been shorn of their ladylike and smiling greenness. Pea vines in the garden always seem such gentle ladies, clad in a fabric of soft, semitransparent green, nodding and smiling, slender, tall and sweet. But when the woodchuck romps back up the row nothing is to be seen but the smile.

They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I once heard a vigorous discussion amongst men who know the woods and the ways of wild creatures, as to whether or not a woodchuck can climb a tree. The discussion ended rather abruptly when one of the party produced a photograph of a woodchuck a dozen feet up a big pine sitting on a small stub of a limb, looking somewhat exultant but also as if he wondered not only how he got so high but how on earth he was ever to get down again. I myself would not have believed a woodchuck could climb a tree of that size if I had not seen the photograph, and I fear there are some doubters in the party to this day. But whether or not a woodchuck can climb a big pine he can go up a bean pole as far as a bean vine can climb, and return with the bean vine inside. It takes but a few mornings for a woodchuck who means to keep fat enough not to shame his tribe to send a fleet of beans, that but now had everything set in living green from main truck to keelson, scudding down the garden under bare poles, a melancholy sight to the amateur truck farm navigator. On peas and beans the woodchuck holds his own, and he reckons as his own all that the garden contains. For all that you find frequently one that has a special taste. My last year's most intimate woodchuck climbed the bean poles and romped the rows of early peas as I have described. These were his occupation, his day's work, so to speak, and he went at them at the first blink of dawn and got them off his mind. Then he retired to his burrow just on the corner of the garden before either the sun or I got up, and slept the dreamless sleep of one who has labored righteously and fed well. I suspect him of letting out his belt a hole a day on this plethora of protein that I had been coaxing up the bean poles all the spring.

After that for the balance of the day Mr. Woodchuck was a dilettante, sitting at his door in the sun and dreaming dreams of artistic elegance in horticulture. I used to see him there about 10 A.M., wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic temperament, batting a speculative eye at me meanwhile, but not in any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing to resent. He had absorbed the unearned increment and I had my original capital, the bean poles, intact-and that's more than most of us realize on small investments, nowadays. So I dare say he thought I had nothing to feel grieved about. Later he would sally forth and carry out his artistic dreams on my Hubbard squashes. I have never had Hubbard squashes pruned into such artistic shapes as that year. The squash vine is a great stragger if left to its own devices.

It will start from the corn hill where it is produced and go down the row fifteen feet, then climb a corn stalk, leap to the fence six feet away and eventually hang a row of Hubbard squashes around a neighbor's pet pear tree. The woodchuck stopped all that. He began early in the summer on the vine tips and worked inward well up to the stump at each meal. The vines were husky and had more latent buds than I had believed possible. Every time the woodchuck cut them back they started something in a new place for his incisive pruning shears. Some people trim evergreens on their lawns into grotesque shapes. My woodchuck invented that sort of thing all over again on Hubbard squash vines. After some weeks I had a new and strange race of decorative plants that, like Katisha's left elbow, people came miles to see. But they did not produce squashes. Dilettantism doesn't.

In the end, of course, like the small boy at whose house the minister was to take dinner, I had to get the woodchuck, after which the garden was more productive if not so picturesque and romantic.

The full-grown woodchuck rarely leaves the burrow except to forage. That done he spends some time usually just at the entrance sunning himself. But most of the time, day and night, he is within, presumably asleep half the summer long. The young woodchucks at this time of year are more often seen abroad, for the parents send them forth upon the world to earn their own living at a rather tender age. They roam the fields and thickets and do not seem especially afraid of man, scuttling into the underbrush perhaps with their whistling squeal, but just as likely to sit back on their haunches and offer to fight. The mortality among them at this time must be great. Foxes pick them up and feed them to their own young. Hawks and owls do the same and dogs find them an easy prey. But enough get by such dangers to dig burrows in the fall and next spring move up to somebody's garden patch, there to absorb feasts and defy fates until the outraged householder stalks forth and deals death amid the ruins of his hopes. The woodchuck sitting by his burrow in the far pasture is a friendly little chap, whom I wish well. I would not harm a hair of him. But the woodchuck that has adopted suburban life is a menace of whom I am forced to say in the words of Cato of old "Delenda est Carthago."

The forefathers found the woodchuck here, probably in the first spring garden which they planted over the graves of the dead in Plymouth, saw how much he had eaten and promptly named him, his name meaning "little pig of the woods." Chuck or chuckie is a word of their time, and I dare say now, meaning "little pig." The idea is again expressed in the rather less polite form of "ground hog" and the hereabouts at least, little known "Maryland marmot" is a third. Scientifically he is known as Arctomys monax, being a rodent and classed with the marmots, very close relatives of the squirrels. Perhaps it is through this family affinity that he is able to climb my bean poles.

The woodchuck has one other distinguishing characteristic which deserves reference, that is his ability as a sleeper. As a home body he is great. As an absorber of garden truck he is greater. But when the sun of October swings low in the south and he has become so fat that he seems to roll to and from his burrow on castors is when he shows his most surprising characteristic. Mr. Wardle's fat boy with all his fame never slept as the woodchuck then prepares to sleep, however well he matched his eating. The first chill wind sets him to dragging dry leaves and grass down into the snuggest chamber of his burrow and there a little later he tucks his nose in between his little black-gloved forepaws and goes to sleep. When the woodchuck is leaner he goes to sleep by drowsily sitting upright, his head drooping lower and lower until he finally rolls into a round ball and falls on his side. But in late October the woodchuck is so nearly round with obesity that he cannot roll up and I fancy him just withdrawing his nose and his toes a little farther into himself, and going to sleep in that attitude with a sigh of content. The woodchuck's chief fame seems to rest on this trait, his ability to go to sleep before cold weather and not wake up again until the spring has again brought out the green things for his delectation. To be sure tradition has it that the ground hog comes to the mouth of his burrow on Candlemas Day and looks for his shadow that he may figure out how much longer he may sleep. But that I take to be a mere literary furnishing, like the chuck part of the animal's name, brought from England with the pioneers and adapted to use in this country. Probably it is said in England of the dormouse, which also sleeps winters, as does the woodchuck, though I believe lightly compared with our animal. The woodchuck is far too sound a sleeper to wake up on a February day, whatever the inducements.

That matter is no more to be taken seriously than is the old-time Yankee query-

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck,
If a woodchuck would chuck wood?

which seems to me to emphasize the whole popular conception of the animal. Of all the common New England animals he is the one taken least seriously. Even if he does eat up all our summer garden we are apt to grin as we bear it; or if we do go out and "get" him, we do it with a forgiving, pitying smile.

CHAPTER XII

ALONG THE SALT MARSHES

When the wind is east Sumner's Islands seems to tug at its moorings like a cruiser swinging at a short hawser in the shelter of Stony beach. If you will stand on the tip of its gray rock prow and face the sea it is hard not to feel the rise and fall of surges under you, and in fancy you have one ear cocked for the boatswain's whistle and the call to the watch to bear a hand and get the anchor aboard. Just a moment and you will feel the pulse of the screw, hear the clink-clank of shovels and slice-bars, tinkling faintly up the ventilator; one bell will sound in the engine room and under slowest speed she will fall away from the sheltering beach, round the fragrant greenery of the Glades rocks and, free from their buttressing, prance exultantly to four bells and a jingle out into the surgent tumult of the roaring sea. Wow! but the fancy sets your blood to bubbling and your pulse to swinging in rhythm with the long surges that leap about Minot's and froth white over Chest ledge and the Willies, that come on to drown the inner Osher rocks in exultant whirlpools and fluff the loose stones of the beach into a foam that ripples over the breakwater into the road that snuggles behind it.

But that is when the wind is east and really blows, when November has stripped the oak and hickory upper works of the cruiser bare of leaves and she stands grim in her gray war-paint, ready for the winter's battles. Now she is gay in summer greenery and many a string of flower signals flutters from mast head and signal yard. You must go astern to get the wind in your face, for now it sings gently in from the west across a mile of salt marsh, pools of imprisoned tide where night-herons feed and tiny crabs and cobblers scurry to shelter beneath the mud at the jar of your footfall, winding creeks that twice a day brim with silver water, and levels of quivering marsh grass, to Cohasset harbor and the green hillsides of the Jerusalem road.

The island is an island by courtesy only at this time of year, aground in the green marsh. The bashful tides of summer yearn shyly toward it, and twice every twenty-four hours stretch soft white arms up the creeks from Cohasset harbor to the east and the west and fondle it. They hold it close at the hour of flood, but hand does not clasp hand about it, and the dry sand that links it to the beach and the breakwater is not wet. When the autumn winds shall come and the sea shakes itself out of its summer lethargy and asserts its power and will not be denied, it is different. At such times it roars over the beach and the breakwater and drowns the white sands that have kept the hands of its summer tides apart. It marches deep green up Cohasset harbor and brims the slender creeks. It passes their limits at a leap, and swirls in defiant, dogged depths over the drowned marshes. Then the island is an island in very truth, and the sea takes his love upon his broad bosom and rocks it, not always so tenderly. No man can guess the power of the floods and the deep sea currents herded by an easterly gale till he has seen the leaping of the flood tide at such a time.

Now it is a time of July gentleness and fripperies of color. The salt marsh, to be sure, never lacks these, even in the dead of winter, when high tides continually load it with sea ice, and then receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to use it for a mixing pot for the coloring of the October woods. All their flame and gold are there, toned to soft warm browns and tender olives just flecked with crimson and with yellow flame.

Looking westward from the island at high tide this morning you could see already deep hints of this coming autumn coloring, swelling out of the deep green of grasses that make up the main carpeting of the marsh, touches of brown and olive that are singularly pleasing to the eye under the summer blue of the sky and its fleecy flecking of white clouds. Amid these, scattered here and there, round eye-like pools reflect this summer blue and fleecy whiteness and all along the island's verge and that of other islands and the borders of the Glades was the pink of wild roses and morning glories, both of which seem to thrive better and bloom later in the season here than inland. But the softest and loveliest coloring that the marsh will ever get is that which the gray mists of early morning seem to have brought in and left like a fragrant memory of themselves, the lavender gray of the marsh-rosemary. "There's rosemary; that's for remembrance," said Ophelia, and many a lover of sea and marsh-side will carry longest in memory the gentle sadness that the tint of the sea-lavender gives the marsh when all its other colors are still those of the flush joy of summer. Remembering Ophelia, marsh-rosemary seems its best name, though you have a right to sea-lavender if you wish. If the sea fogs did not bring it as an essence of the first glimpse of dawn in gray ocean spaces, then I am convinced that the loving tides bear it as a gift to the island and scatter it shyly at its feet, after dark.

You have but to wander about the shores of the island at the marsh line to find strange evidence of this gift-bearing propensity of the shy tides. Trinkets of all sorts that they gather in travels in distant seas the tides bring and lay lovingly at the roots of black oak and sweet gum, hickory and stag-horn sumac. Here is bamboo that for all I know grew near the head waters of the Orinoco, though it may have sprouted in the Bahamas, floated north by the Gulf Stream, shunted from its warm edge into the chill of the Labrador current and drawn thence by the Cohasset tides. Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come, chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a thousand tiny things picked up at points between.

But the tides bring to the marsh and the island in it, to all shores that they touch here on our Atlantic seaboard, more than this. They bear deep in their emerald hearts, generated in their cool, clear depths, a rich vivific principle that bears vigor to all that they touch and sends rich emanations forth on the air beyond. Today on the inland hills and land-bound pastures the sun beat in sullen insolence and the wind from the west scorched and wilted the life in all things. The same wind, coming to me across two miles of salt marsh, had in its cool, salty aroma a life-giving principle that set the pulse to bounding and renewed vigor. It had gathered up from the marsh this tonic of the tides, this elixir vitae which all the doctors of the world have sought in vain. Some day some one of them, wiser than the rest, will distil its potency from the cool salt of sea tides, and humanity, poor hitherto, will find itself rich in possibilities of physical immortality. Sea captains have a foolish custom of settling down at eighty to enjoy life on shore, else there is no knowing how long they would live. They have breathed the aroma of this life-giving essence all their lives.

Yet the sea itself is dead; it is a vast accumulation of the product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite space, shocking together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life thereon, so it seems as if the atoms of sea water, ever rushing to restless collision, burst continually into renewed life. All forms are in it, from the mightiest mammals to the protozoa which the microscope suspects rather than surely discovers. Every time molecule touches molecule in the depths, a new spark of tiny life must flare up, else never so many could inhabit the water. The coarser aggregations of these we see in bewildering profusion and variety every time the tides fall back and leave the rocks bare. At the bottom of the ebb I like to climb perilously down the rough Glades cliffs to life-brooding pools and inlets, where lazy waves swirl or are for a brief hour cut off. At the half-tide line the rock that is a reddish granite becomes chalky white with the shells of barnacles that cover every inch of space from there down. Acorn-like, they cluster closer than ever acorns did on the most prolific oak. After the tides reach them as they rise, the whole surface of the rock must be fuzzy with their curved cirri of tongues which protrude and lap the rising waves. Their number is legion, yet how infinite must be the fine floating life, so fine that we cannot note that it clouds the limpid water, on which these sessile gray creatures feed.

Below a certain level these are crowded out by the mussels which grow in such dense accumulations that they cling not only to the rock but to one another and to stubby brown seaweed till they are like nothing so much as pods of bees swarming about their queen. So dense is this grouping of living creatures that the inner ones are smothered by their crowding fellows and serve merely as a foundation on which these build. Even among these swarm starfishes and limpets and other crustaceans, and streamers of kelp squirm out from the rock where they keep slender hold, to sway in the restless water, just as all the rocks above a certain depth and below a certain height are olive black with dense hangings of rockweed while in depths that are just awash at low tide they are olive brown with unending mats of Irish moss. These are but the forms of overwhelming life that meet the eye on first descending into the cool depths. To name all that may be noted in just the pause of a single ebb would be to become a catalogue.

Along the Salt Marsh

Yet howsoever vivid the life or astounding by its multiplicity it is not impressions of these that linger long after one has come up from the bottom of the ebb. It is rather that here one has breathed the air of the deep life laboratory of the world, that into his lungs and pores and all through his marrow has thrilled a breath of that subtle essence, that life renewing principle which Fernando de Soto sought in the fountain of youth which he thought bubbled from Florida sands but which in reality foamed beneath his furrowing keel as he ploughed the sea in search of it. It is the same thrill which the wilting west wind steeps from the salt marsh as it comes across, some baffling and alluring ether distilled from under-sea caverns where cool green mermen tend emerald fires. The scent of it levitates from the wash of every wave and if you will watch with pure eyes and clear sight you may of moonlight nights see white-bodied mermaids flashing through the combers to drink of it. No wonder these are immortal.

Nor can you take from the things of the sea this life-giving essence, once they have attained it through growth during immersion in its depths, though perchance, as Emerson sang, "they left their beauty on the shore, with the sun and the sand and the wild uproar." The shell on the mantel shelf of the mariner's inland home may be unsightly and out of place. But put your ear to it. Out of the common noises of the day, it weaves for you the song of the deep tides, the murmur of ocean caves and the croon of the breakers on the outer reef, and dull indeed is your inner ear if you cannot hear these things, and at the sound see the perfect curl of green waves and smell that cool fragrance which comes only from their breaking.