of it.

Those two things aside on any before Christmas week it is possible
to see the landing-place of the Pilgrims much as they saw it, to
feel the same stormy weather sweep across the same sea and to see
landward the same hills clad with dark forests tossing their giant
branches and seeming to hold much of mystery and dread. To know
just a little of what they saw and felt one need but to stand on
the brow of Manomet Head when a December night lowers and the
northeast wind is hurling the surf on the rocks out of "a very
grown sea."

CHAPTER V

THE SINGING PINES

The pines were asleep in the noonday heat
That shimmered down the lea,
But they waked with the roar of a wave-swept shore
When the wind came in from the sea.

They sang of ships, and the bosun piped,
The hoarse watch roared a tune,
The taut sheets whined in the twanging wind,
You heard the breakers croon.

For their brothers, masts on a thousand keels,
Had sent a greeting free,
And the answering song swelled clear and strong
When the wind came in from the sea.

Last night I heard the pines sing again. A winter midnight was on
the woods, while a northeaster smote the coast, a dozen miles
away, with the million sledges of the surf. So mighty was the
story of this smiting that for long I thought the pines sang of
nothing else. In places and at times they told it with astonishing
fidelity. A forty-mile gale muttered and grumbled to itself high
in air above. Its voice was that of the gale anywhere when
unobstructed. You may hear it at sea or ashore, a hubbub of tones
indistinguishable as gust shoulders against gust and grumbles
about it. In the quiet at the bottom of the wood I could hear
this, too, especially at times when the wind lifted above the pine
tops, leaving them in hushed expectancy of the story to come, a
telling oratorical pause. For a little the voice of the gale
itself would come burbling down into the momentary stillness, then
with a gasp at the awesomeness of the tale the pines would take up
the story again. In it there was none of the dainty romance the
boughs will weave for the listener who cares to know their
language of a sunny summer afternoon, little stories of tropic
seas, of nodding sails and of flying fish that spring from the
foam beneath the forefoot and skim the purple waves. This song was
an epic of the age-long battle between the sea and the shore, a
song without words,