in that
multitude of couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life;
you feel as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent
nights, but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek them, on their way
across the Cape, and the sweet-bay and green fern embed them in a
softer and deeper setting as the years go by. This is the "height of
ground" of that wild footpath; but as you recede farther from the outer
ocean and approach Gloucester, you come among still wilder ledges,
unsafe without a guide, and you find in one place a cluster of deserted
houses, too difficult of access to remove even their materials, so that
they are left to moulder alone. I used to wander in those woods, summer
after summer, till I had made my own chart of their devious tracks, and
now when I close my eyes in this Oldport midsummer, the soft Italian
air takes on something of a Scandinavian vigor; for the incessant roll
of carriages I hear the tinkle of the quarryman's hammer and the
veery's song; and I long for those perfumed and breezy pastures, and
for those promontories of granite where the fresh water is nectar and
the salt sea has a regal blue.

I recall another footpath near Worcester, Massachusetts; it leads up
from the low meadows into the wildest region of all that vicinity,
Tatesset Hill. Leaving behind you the open pastures where the cattle
lie beneath the chestnut-trees or drink from the shallow brook, you
pass among the birches and maples, where the woodsman's shanty stands
in the clearing, and the raspberry-fields are merry with children's
voices. The familiar birds and butterflies linger below with them, and
in the upper and more sacred depths the wood-thrush chants his litany
and the brown mountain butterflies hover among the scented vines.
Higher yet rises the "Rattlesnake Ledge," spreading over one side of
the summit a black avalanche of broken rock, now overgrown with
reindeer-moss and filled with tufts of the smaller wild geranium. Just
below this ledge,--amid a dark, dense track of second-growth forest,
masked here and there with grape-vines, studded with rare orchises, and
pierced by a brook that vanishes suddenly where the ground sinks away
and lets the blue distance in,--there is a little monument to which the
footpath leads, and which always seemed to me as wild a memorial of
forgotten superstition as the traveller can find amid the forests of
Japan.

It was erected by a man called Solomon Pearson (not