T2 DYER'S HOLLOW. 
of barrenness and drought increased as we 
advaneed, 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,! 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 agricultural- 
ists. And still, although their best garden 
is the bay, they have their gardens on land 
also, —the bottoms of the deepest hollows 
being selected for the purpose,—and by 
1 In looking over the town history, I was pleased to 
come upon a note in defense of this lowly plant, on the 
score not only of its beauty, but of its usefulness in hold- 
ing the sand in place; but, alas, “all men have not 
faith,’ and where the historian wrote Hudsonia tomen- 
tosa the antipathetic compositor set up Hudsonia tor- 
mentosa. That compositor was a Cape Cod man, —I 
would wager a dinner upon it. ‘*Thus the whirligig of 
time brings in his revenges,” I hear him mutter, as he 
slips the superfluous consonant into its place. 
