ON FIRST TRAIL OF PILGRIMS 83 



resents a drawn battle between whelming sands, 

 wind-driven, and a vigorous wild cherry tree. 

 How such a tree finds its start in these shifting, 

 scouring sands is a puzzle. Yet once started it 

 is easy to follow with more or less accuracy the 

 course of the war which lasts years. The winds 

 take the young shoot for a nucleus and pile their 

 sands all up about it, yet may not quite cover the 

 very tip, for there the varying draft whirls the 

 topmost sands away again. The sand really 

 helps. It mulches the young plant and protects 

 it from the winter cold and the gales, from the 

 summer heat and the drought. Each year the 

 thus protected plant grows joyously more straight 

 shoots, to be whelmed again almost to the tips by 

 the sand, and so the merry war goes on till finally 

 we have a dune twenty-five or thirty feet high, 

 with the trunk and larger branches of a wild 

 cherry tree for a core, its smooth, hard-packed 

 surface wreathed with green leaves and often 

 bearing rich, dark fruit for the delectation of all 

 who pass. 



These brief, hill-top oases do not relieve the 

 desert-like wildness of this narrowest part of the 



