favored uplands one finds the Scotch heather and he might think
it had been brought by the loving hand of some Scotchman were it
not for the fact that the earliest settlers found it here. They
came, these earliest settlers, in 1659, Thomas Macy and his wife,
Edward Starbuck, James Coffin and Isaac Coleman, a boy of twelve,
storm-tossed about Cape Cod and over the shoals, all the way from
Salisbury. For them the merrymen breakers on the shoals danced as
they do for the incomers of today. They were not sailors, not even
the master of the ship. Perhaps that is why they kept on to the
end of the two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and
they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another
strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue,
the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in
Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but surprising on this
island.

In these two plants at least east and west stand face to face
across Nantucket harbor, the cactus holding the sandspit to the
north, the heather on the main island to the south. In April the
prickly pear is as ugly as sin to the eye with its lobster-claw
growth, uglier still to the hand with its steel-pointed thorns,
but later it will put forth wonderful yellow, wild-rose like
blooms in rich profusion, making up for all its dourness.
Professor Asa Gray, the distinguished botanist of a half century
ago, used to say that nothing in the way of plant life could
surprise him on Nantucket. Probably this juxtaposition of cactus
and heather prompted the feeling.

Nantucket town straggles from beach to hilltop and along shore at
its own sweet will, gradually merging into wind-swept moreland on
the south and east and west. Here, again, Bostonians should be at
home, for the streets grew no doubt from cow-paths winding
leisurely from house to pasture, and down them at night, even now,
some of them, the cows stray and nibble on the homeward way. I
fancy no town so individual in its characteristics still remains
in the State. The very pavements smack of it. Here is an old-time
cobblestone, then long, smooth stretches of asphalt. Again, just
dirt, and the three meet and mingle in stretches long and short,
in whose variations one seeks in vain for a reason. So with side-walks,
brick passes to flagging, to asphalt, to dirt and back again in the
distance of half a block. And even the brick changesoften and suddenly.
Here it lies flat,