128 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



a place for five minutes is to make it your own 

 home, and you go away with regret and a cer- 

 tain homesickness. Huckleberry bushes, maples, 

 beach plums and birches stand admiringly round, 

 and wild grasses and pasture flowers crowd in 

 and add to the cosiness. 



Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is 

 most profuse. Pasture-born like the cedars, it 

 too loves the sea and crowds to its very edge like 

 the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close in- 

 deed that at high tides the smelt and young her- 

 ring, swimming in silver shoals, nibble at the 

 bare toes the plants dabble in the water. You may 

 know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for 

 the plants quiver and shake with suppressed 

 laughter at being thus tickled. The seaside gol- 

 denrod is prettier now in the cool winds and under 

 the pale October sun's slant rays than it was in 

 the heyday of August, when it burgeoned with 

 yellow racemes of rather coarse bloom. Its 

 head-gear is in the full autumn style, and it bows 

 beneath the weight of ostrich-plume pappus and 

 softens all the foreground of the view with gray 

 fluff. 



