y wind, with a "very grown
sea" such as beat upon the coast at the beginning of this week,
sending the white horses racing up the beach below Manomet Head,
which has been named for them, and smashing in continuous thunder
on the stern and rockbound cliffs between White Horse Beach and
Plymouth harbor.

To see Manomet in stormy December is to know how grim it is. The
wooded headland which the little shallop so desperately won by in
the gloom of that December twilight and storm has changed little
if any since that time. Stern and rock-bound it certainly is. The
sea of centuries has beaten against the great drumlins of boulder-till
and has not moved the boulders that bind them together. At
the most it has but washed out the smaller ones, leaving the sea
front surfaced with great white granite rocks that gleam like
marble in the sundown to the limits of the washing tide, then
shine olive green with the froth of the waves. From the sands of
White Horse Beach to those of the Spit in Plymouth harbor there is
no place where that storm-tossed shallop might have made a landing
with any hope of safety. To have turned toward the shore as the
pilot bade them when the mast broke would have been to drown the
whole company in the surf, in which case Plymouth would never have
been. No one knows the name of the "lustie seaman" who then
usurped the command and bade the rowers "if they were men, about
with her, or else they were all cast away." On the words of this
courageous unknown hung the lives of the company and perhaps the
fate of the expedition itself. It is a stern and rock-bound coast
in very truth, and if it seemed as dark and forbidding on that
December nightfall in 1620 as it did on one of the same date this
year, I for one would not have blamed them had they sailed away,
never to come back. For a quarter of a mile off shore scattered
boulders curried the surf and fluffed it into white foam. Its
deafening roar was filled with menace. Salt spray and sleet
mingled cut one's face rods back from the shore, and high up the
dark hill behind rose the gnarled woodland, wailing and tossing
its giant branches. With the fall of night no light was visible
from sea or shore. All was as primal, as chaotic, as menacing as
it had been on that Friday night three centuries before when the
Pilgrims' shallop beat in by the point, its tiny white sail
drowned like the wing of a seagull in the dusky welter of the sea.

[Illustration: The Stern an