io LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



age of these by dividing their present bulk with 

 the slight increase that each year brings is to place 

 the birth of these trees far back in the centuries. 

 Not one hundred years will account for it, nor 

 two, and I am quite sure that these trees were 

 growing where they now stand when Peregrine 

 White's mother first embarked on the Mayflower 

 at Southampton. Webster's path may have gone 

 through them then, and no one knows how long 

 before, for it is worn deep not only on the steep 

 hillsides where the rains have helped it but in level 

 reaches beyond where only the passing and re- 

 passing of feet through centuries would have done 

 it. It was as direct a route from the hills to the 

 mouth of Cut River at Green Harbor before the 

 white man's time as after, and if I am not mis- 

 taken the red men trod it long before the first 

 ship's keel furrowed Plymouth Bay. 



As I topped the rise I found myself in a hilltop 

 pasture a half-mile long which covers the rest of 

 the hill. Once it was a cultivated field, and the 

 corn-hills of the last planter still show in spots, 

 these, like the rest of it, now overgrown with 

 close-set grass and crisp reindeer lichen. The 



