sting the ooze
on the tip of the lead. He who

roared to Marden
Nantucket's sunk and here we are
Right over old Marm Hackett's garden.

In a northwest gale the Nantucketer, though far to the southeast,
should be able to locate the shoals and steer home by the smell of
the wind.

On less uproarious days one gets all along the downs the rich,
ozonic odor of the deep sea for a fundamental delight. And always
with it are the perfumes of the blossoming land. There is
tradition of heavy oak timbers once growing on Nantucket, but only
the tradition remains. Here now are low forests of stunted pitch
pines, sending their rich resinous aroma on all winds. Arid in
late April with these comes the spicy smell of the trailing
arbutus, which hides all along the ground among poverty weed, gray
cladium moss, and Indian wood grass, sometimes starring the mossy
mats of mealy-plum with the pinky-white of its blooms. The mealy-plum
itself shows faint coral edging of pink young buds, and here
and there a thistle plant, stemless as yet, looks like a green and
bristly starfish in the grass. Isolated red cedars on this wind-swept
down grow round balls of dense green foliage four or five
feet in diameter, looking as if it needed but a blow of an axe at
the butt to send them rolling down wind like big tumble weeds.
Scrub oaks curiously take the same form, and clumps of bayberry,
black huckleberries and sweet fern are often rounded off to
hemispheres.

[Illustration: Bayberry and Pitch Pine along a Nantucket Trail]

Four silver-toned strokes from the old Lisbon bell in the watch
tower warn of dawn in Nantucket in late April. This bell was one
of six cast in a Lisbon, Portugal, foundry, intended for a
Portugal convent of much renown. In 1812, Captain Charles Clasby
of Nantucket visited this foundry, bought the bell, which had not
yet been dedicated, sending it to the island in the whaleship
William and Nancy, Captain Thomas Cary, and in 1815 it was hung in
the tower. Soon after the stroke of four the sparrows begin to
chatter, but before long one hears through their uproar the clear
whistle of meadow larks. These flit familiarly about the lower
levels of the town singing from gate-post or shed-roof all day
long and on the downs they vie with the song sparrows in breaking
the lone silence of the place. Save for these, a crow or two and
the shadow of a sailing hawk, the uplands lack bird life in April.

He who would see birds in