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