essant attacks of the insatiate and
bloodthirsty mosquitoes. We are here in their very home, and, galled by
their furious stinging onslaughts, can recall nothing but Ayres's
exclamation:

Cheerless Neapeague! how bounds the heart to gain
The hills that spring beyond thy weary plain!

The busy, bloodthirsty wretches spring in clouds from every swamp. They
fill the air, obscure the blue lining of the wagon with their own tawny
gray, and would, I verily believe, turn a white horse brown. But the end
comes at length, and as we climb the hill bounding the beach on the east
the last of the little tormentors disappears. To our left are the
Nommonock Hills, and those of Hither Wood rise in front of us. At the
point now reached it is well to turn round and view the land we have
passed. We can look across from shore to shore, from the ocean breakers
on the south to the little harbor of Neapeague on the north, and beyond
it to where Gardiner's Island lies out in the bay. The conviction grows
upon us that where we now stand was once an island, and that the rugged
base of Nommonock was once washed by the sea.

[Illustration: KING DAVID FARO AND FAMILY.]

Soon we pass through the Hither Woods, and with them leave behind the
last remnant of the forest that formerly covered Montauk. All else, to
where Womponomon--the Indian name of the eastern point--juts out into
the sea, are hills and rolling downs which rise and fall like the sea
when the waves are running "mountains high." Here and there we pass a
pond, and often startle the cattle that graze over the greater part of
Montauk; and at length pause, spellbound by the view from the hills
looking down upon Fort Pond, or Kongonock. The road runs past its
southern extremity, where, until the embankment was built, the
ocean-surf frequently broke across; and after passing this plain, called
Fithian's, we find ourselves a very short distance south of the site of
the old Indian village. The hill about halfway between the two ends of
the pond on its eastern side was once occupied by an Indian fort, and
between it and us lies the valley where were clustered the wigwams of
Wyandanch and his tribe. He figures in history as the staunch and often
severely-tried ally of the whites, and was the lifelong friend of Lion
Gardiner. His warriors were, hyperbolically, "as many as the spires of
the grass" until reduced by sickness and battle. The Narragansetts
pursued him with an ins