marks of Pilgrim feet are buried beneath city pavement,
save perhaps on the crest of the hill itself, and though bluebird
and robin flutter shyly to its upper end in spring as did their
pilgrim fathers before them, the arbutus, from earliest days to
this the Plymouth flower, no longer grows on its margin. He who
has not longed to pick a mayflower in Plymouth on Mayday is not a
New Englander. That is perhaps why the arbutus no longer grows
along byways of the old town as once it did. Instead you must seek
the Pilgrim paths out of town to find it.

One of these leads down along shore, over Manomet and on through
Plymouth woods toward the old trysting place with the Dutch
traders. The men of New Amsterdam, journeying in boats along Long
Island Sound and up Buzzards Bay met the Plymouth men yearly and
held a most decorous carnival of barter. Tradition has it that the
Plymouth men made the trip by sea to the nearest point on the Bay
shore. I do not know if the meeting place is known, but I know a
moss-grown and gnarled red cedar on the margin of Buttermilk Bay,
as we now call it, which I am sure was growing there when the
first swapping of commodities took place and in the shade of whose
branches the grave and sturdy traders may have sat.

Here and there in Pilgrim land you find a tree like that, one that
by some chance the axe of the woodman has spared as one generation
of wood cutters followed another, that still stands where the seed
fell, no man knows how many centuries ago. We have trees in
eastern Massachusetts to whom a thousand years is but as yesterday
when it is passed, many on which the centuries have rested
lightly. I think this Onset cedar one of these.

The road that leads from Plymouth to it is vexed daily by
innumerable wheels; of a summer holiday the wayside watcher may
count the motors by the thousand; yet you have but to step a rod
or two off its tarred, tire-beaten surface to find wild woodland
as primitive as it was three hundred years ago. The spring seeking
motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up
Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere,
after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but
those who built for modern traffic took little heed of old-time
footpath ways. They gouged the hills, they filled the hollows and
drew their long black scar behind for mile after mile.

Like the deer and the wild fowl the old trails care little for
this. The