process which took twenty yoke of oxen and was accompanied by
wild huzzahing. There the poor, broken thing lay in the sun, at the
bottom of the Liberty Pole on which was flying, "Liberty or Death." But
its career as a public feature had only begun. It remained in the square
until 1834, and then on July 4 it was decided to drag it to a still more
conspicuous place. So with a formal procession, it was again hoisted and
hauled and set down in front of the entrance porch of Pilgrim Hall,
where it lay like a captive mammoth animal for curious folk to gaze at.
Here it was granted almost half a century of undisturbed if not secluded
slumber. But the end was not yet. In 1880 it was once more laid hold of
and carted back to its original setting, and welded without ceremony, to
the part from which it had been sundered. Now all of this seems quite
enough--more than enough--of pitiless publicity, for one old rock whose
only offense had been to be lifting its head above the water on a
December day in 1620. But no--just as the mind of man takes a singular
satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the
unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder--now
carefully mended--was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and
over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest
granite canopy imaginable--in which canopy, to complete the grisly
atmosphere of the catacombs, were placed certain human bones found in an
exploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak and homeless the old rock now lies
passively in forlorn state under its atrocious shelter, behind a strong
iron grating, and any of a dozen glib street urchins, in syllables
flavored with Cork, or Genoese, or Polish accents, will, for a penny,
relate the facts substantially as I have stated them.[2]

It is easy to be unsympathetic in regard to any form of fetishism which
we do not share. And while the bare fact remains that we are not at all
sure that the Pilgrims landed on this rock, and we are entirely sure
that its present location and setting possess no romantic allurement,
yet bare facts are not the whole truth, and even when correct they are
often the superficial and not the fundamental part of the truth. Those
hundreds--those thousands--of earnest-eyed men and women who have stood
beside this rock with tears in their eyes, and emotions too deep for
words in their hearts, "believing where they cannot prove," have not
only interpret