of Dyer's Hollow I fell in love with it, and now
that I have left it behind me, perhaps forever, I foresee that my
memories of it are likely to be even fairer and brighter than was the
place itself. I call it Dyer's Hollow upon the authority of the town
historian, who told me, if I understood him correctly, that this was its
name among sailors, to whom it is a landmark. By the residents of the
town I commonly heard it spoken of as Longnook or Pike's Hollow, but for
reasons of my own I choose to remember it by its nautical designation,
though myself as far as possible from being a nautical man.

To see Dyer's Hollow at its best, the visitor should enter it at the
western end, and follow its windings till he stands upon the bluff
looking out upon the Atlantic. If his sensations at all resemble mine,
he will feel, long before the last curve is rounded, as if he were
ascending a mountain; and an odd feeling it is, the road being level, or
substantially so, for the whole distance. At the outset he is in a
green, well-watered valley on the banks of what was formerly Little
Harbor. The building of the railway embankment has shut out the tide,
and what used to be an arm of the bay is now a body of fresh water.
Luxuriant cat-tail flags fringe its banks, and cattle are feeding near
by. Up from the reeds a bittern will now and then start. I should like
to be here once in May, to hear the blows of his stake-driver's mallet
echoing and re-echoing among the close hills. At that season, too, all
the uplands would be green. So we were told, at any rate, though the
pleasing story was almost impossible of belief. In August, as soon as we
left the immediate vicinity of Little Harbor, the very bottom of the
valley itself was parched and brown; and the look of barrenness and
drought increased as we advanced, till toward the end, as the last
houses were passed, the total appearance of things became subalpine:
stunted, weather-beaten trees, and broad patches of bearberry showing at
a little distance like beds of mountain cranberry.

All in all, Dyer's Hollow did not impress me as a promising farming
country. Acres and acres of horseweed, pinweed, stone clover, poverty
grass,[8] reindeer moss, mouse-ear everlasting, and bearberry! No wonder
such fields do not pay for fencing-stuff. No wonder, either, that the
dwellers here should be mariculturalists rather than agriculturalists.
And still, although their best garden is the bay, they have thei