154 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



June, when it seems as if the sun had wrought a 

 miracle among the bleak ledges and along the 

 treeless slopes. Everywhere then in the seem- 

 ingly barren pastures springs up the shrubby, 

 lanceolate-leaved genista, clothing them in a roll- 

 ing sea of its golden bloom. For weeks then the 

 hills are glad with a wonder of papilionaceous 

 yellow blossoms that any other pastures, however 

 prolific of beauty, find it hard to match. The 

 same Puritans that cherished the witchcraft de- 

 lusion brought this plant with them from England, 

 the dyer's greenweed, woadwaxen or whin, and 

 as they passed on into history left it behind them. 

 It has wandered far in the waste places in New 

 England, but nowhere does it so clothe the hills 

 and rough slopes with beauty as it does in the re- 

 gion about Salem. The thought of this, already 

 pushing up through the sod, is best to take back 

 to the city with one. As the good in the Puritans 

 was far greater than their grim misdeeds, so this 

 goes far to hide the bleakness of the ledges, as it 

 seems striving to. Perhaps some day it will even 

 overgrow and hide the iron in the summit of the 

 hill where children play to-day, and make them 



