sounded lonely, and nobody was met or
overtaken to whom he could brag of his success. Now and then he looked
back with joy to the hill behind the Packer house, where the assailed
pine-trees still stood together, superb survivors of an earlier
growth. The snow was white about them now, but in summer they stood
near the road at the top of a broad field which had been won from wild
land by generation after generation of the Packers. Whatever man's
hands have handled, and his thoughts have centred in, gives something
back to man, and becomes charged with his transferred life, and
brought into relationship. The great pines could remember all the
Packers, if they could remember anything; they were like some huge
archaic creatures whose thoughts were slow and dim. So many anxious
eyes had sought these trees from the sea, so many wanderers by land
had gladly welcomed the far sight of them in coming back to the old
town, it must have been that the great live things felt their
responsibility as landmarks and sentinels. How could any fisherman
find the deep-sea fishing-grounds for cod and haddock without bringing
them into range with a certain blue hill far inland, or with the
steeple of the old church on the Wilton road? How could a hurrying
boat find the short way into harbor before a gale without sighting the
big trees from point to point among the rocky shallows? It was a
dangerous bit of coast in every way, and every fisherman and
pleasure-boatman knew the pines on Packer's Hill. As for the Packers
themselves, the first great adventure for a child was to climb alone
to the great pines, and to see an astonishing world from beneath their
shadow; and as the men and women of the family grew old, they
sometimes made an effort to climb the hill once more in summer
weather, to sit in the shelter of the trees, where the breeze was
cool, and to think of what had passed, and to touch the rough bark
with affectionate hands. The boys went there when they came home from
voyages at sea; the girls went there with their lovers. The trees were
like friends, and whether you looked seaward, being in an inland
country, or whether you looked shoreward, being on the sea, there they
stood and grew in their places, while a worldful of people lived and
died, and again and again new worldfuls were born and passed away, and
still these landmark pines lived their long lives, and were green and
vigorous yet.

III.

There was a fishing-boat coming in