y 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