106 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



turous migrants have since explored and settled 

 the country to the very tip of Alaska. 



One of the first of these early impulses to 

 move on took Pilgrims to Scituate, and here in 

 1636 an ancestor of Woodworth dug and stoned 

 a well, thirty-six feet deep, in that little corner of 

 the present town now known as Greenbush. The 

 Pilgrim settlers and farmers marked their trails 

 behind them with stones that stand as their most 

 lasting physical memorial to this day. One can 

 but fancy that the glaciers which built the land 

 the Pilgrims were to occupy, grinding, mixing, 

 sifting soil from a thousand miles of back country 

 and dropping it in southeastern Massachusetts, 

 moved on ball-bearings, so numerous are the 

 rounded boulders they dropped behind them in this 

 fertile mixture. The stronger and richer the soil 

 the more of these boulders are to be found in it, 

 and the Pilgrim farmers had a double task in the 

 clearing of their farms. They must not only fell 

 the trees and remove the stumps, but they must go 

 deeper and get out the rocks before their plows 

 could furrow it. How well they set their stub- 

 born wills to the grubbing of these rocks we know 



