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.

[Illustration: 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.