Plymouth has done well in making of this region a park,
beautifying it mainly by letting it alone, merely cutting new
Pilgrim trails through it. Billington's path along the pond shore
is thus made easy for your feet and is marked with his name that
you may not miss it. But if you would see the real Billington
path, made for him by generations of Indians before his day but
the one that I believe he trod, you will look nearer the water's
edge. There, tangled amidst undergrowth now, buried deep in brown
autumn leaves, it is yet visible enough, cut into the soft sand of
the pond bank. In places it is cut deep. In places it is all but
obliterated or vanishes altogether for a little way, perhaps
divides into two or three as the local needs of moccasined
travellers called for, but all along the pond margin it goes. This
is an old Plymouth trail indeed, linking the Plymouth of today
with that of the time of the Pilgrims, and long before. There are
many such that lead out of Plymouth, glimpsing for us the world of
three hundred years ago mirrored in the eyes, the ideas, the
ideals of today. Let us search them out.

[Illustration: Plymouth as the Pilgrims made it]

CHAPTER II

PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS

The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came to
Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had
swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the
Pilgrim's shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken
mast limped in under the lee of Clark's Island. No promise of May
had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill,
yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was
May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful is
April in Pilgrim land. This gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its
outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white
frost followed on all the land.

In the darkest hour of this night, I saw a thin point of light
rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny
sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little
winds of dawn, making port on the shore of "hither Manomet." In
the velvety blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender
sail curved sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop
seemed drawn to the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of
Sindbad the Sailor, and when it magically climbed the dark
headland and sailed away into the sky above, it drew out of the