move the boulders very
fast. Manomet shore and even Plymouth beach are rock-bound with
these, large and small, today as they were when the Pilgrims
fought their desperate, sea-beset way by them through the dusk of
a winter northeaster and froze in safety under the lee of Clark's
Island.

He who would see Plymouth and the Pilgrim land about it as the
Pilgrims saw it may do so. Nature holds grimly onto her own and
sedulously heals the scars that man makes. Beat to windward in the
December twilight following that first trail of the Pilgrim
pinnace, listen to the sullen boom of the breakers on the cliff,
hear the growl of the surf-mauled pebbles on Plymouth beach, feel
the sting of the freezing spray and the bitter grip of the north
wind and you shall find this first Pilgrim trail the same today as
it was three hundred years ago.

Plymouth is a manufacturing city, a residence town, a resort and a
thriving business centre all in one. Except in its carefully
preserved shrines you shall find little suggestion of the Pilgrims
themselves, but you have only to step out of town to find their
very land all about you, traces of their occupancy, the very marks
of their feet, worn in the earth itself. A trail cuts easily into
the forest mould. Once well worn there centuries fail to remove
it. The paths the Pilgrims trod radiate from Plymouth to a score
of places far and near. They tramped to Sandwich and the canal
region, to Middleboro, Bridgewater and Duxbury as we know them
now, to Boston; sooner or later to all the world. Some of the
trails they trod may be forgotten, some of them are main-travelled
highways, others remain narrow footpath ways through a country
beautiful and often as unsophisticated as it was when the feet of
the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world
the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim
trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of
civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into
glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their
kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and
there their very forest trees, await you still. For Indian and
panther you need not look; wolf or bear you will hardly see; the
wild turkeys are gone; otherwise the wild life of the forest
remains.

The first Pilgrim land trail is today Leyden street, leading from
the water's edge to their fort on Burial Hill. You may follow it,
though the