March 2S, 1894.] 



Garden and Forest. 



129 



The male tree seems to be cultivated in Europe, and it may 

 be that of late years this also has found its way to the 

 United States. We have never seen specimens of the stami- 

 nate Willow in this country and would be greatly obliged 

 if any reader who has knowledge of such a tree in this 

 country would report the fact to us. — Ed.] 



Recent Publications. 



The Old Colony Town and other Sketches. By William 

 Root Bliss. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



Some time ago we noticed Mr. Bliss's Colonial Times on 

 Buzzard's Bay, and the town with which he now chiefly 

 deals is Plymouth, from which he makes brief excursions 

 into more southerly regions. He gives us citations from 

 old documents and records which show how thickly 

 wooded were once many regions which now are barren of 

 forest growth, or are covered only by dwarfed substitutes 

 for their original riches. He shows us, too, that the early 

 colonists were desperately afraid of the ruin which even- 

 tually overtook their inheritance in this direction, and that 

 the fact of its arrival at a later day meant no want of wis- 

 dom on their part and no lack of legislation. For example, 

 looking eastward from Plymouth Rock, says Mr. Bliss, 

 " you see a long sand-spit stretching out from the south 

 shore. It keeps the sea-swells from rolling over the harbor 

 when the tide is in. It was once covered with trees ; and 

 a town-meeting of the year 1702 considering 'the great 

 damage likly to accrew the harbour by cutting down the 

 pine trees at the beach'' did order 'that henceforth Noe 

 pine trees shall be felled on forfiture of 5 shillings pr tree 

 & that Noe man shall set aney fire on said beach on forfi- 

 ture of 5 shillings per time.' Now there is not a tree on it.'' 

 Again, from Burial Hill you see " the barren sandy high- 

 land of Cape Cod, which, when the Mayflower arrived, 

 was 'compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, 

 juniper, sassafras and other sweet wood.' " The promon- 

 tory at the end of Duxbury Beach, which bears the Gurnet 

 Lights, and in old times was called "the Gurnett's Nose," 

 was likewise covered with trees. Seventy-five years after 

 the landing of the Pilgrims their species were noted : Wal- 

 nuts, Poplars, Cedars and Hornbeam, which last, says Mr. 

 Bliss, "was a hard wood, used for the keel of ships." 

 Probably Tupelos were meant ; for a little farther to the 

 south, near Buzzard's Bay, these trees are now common, 

 sometimes finely developed in sheltered woodlands, some- 

 times near the edge of the water, so gnarled and torn and 

 twisted that it is hard to determine their character without 

 close examination ; and the only name by which they are 

 locally known is Hornbeams. 



Of Cuttyhunk, one of the islands which lie off the mouth 

 of Buzzard's Bay, Gosnold wrote, nearly three hundred years 

 ago, that it bore "noble forests," and was covered with 

 "the elegantine, the thorn and the honeysuckle, the wild 

 pea, the tansey and young sassafras, strawberries, rasp- 

 berries, grape vines, all in profusion." Now, Mr. Bliss tells 

 us, "its surface is a succession of hills and valleys growing 

 coarse grass, without a tree or a shrub," or any vestige of 

 its former forests. But on Naushon Island, not far away, 

 are "old forests of Beech, Oak, Hickory, Pine and Cedar 

 trees" — evidently owing to the fact that it has always 

 been an undivided piece of property, and during nearly two 

 hundred years was in the possession of only three succes- 

 sive families. Moose and deer were common on this 

 island at least as late as the middle of the last century ; 

 and there are deer still, although no moose, in the woods 

 of Plymouth County and Cape Cod. 



Mr. Bliss tells again the true story of Plymouth Rock, and 

 it is worth repeating, for, although often told before, legend 

 thrives in our new western world as well as in the Old 

 World across the seas, and here, as there, often receives the 

 seal of official endorsement. "Up to the year 1741 this 

 famous Rock . . . rested on the shores unnoticed. It was 

 in the way of commerce, and some persons having, in the 



phrase of the time, ' Libertie to Whorfe downe into the sea,' 

 were about to cover it with a wharf. Then Thomas 

 Faunce, ninety-four years old, came up from the back 

 country and protested, and told the wharf-builders that his 

 father had told him when he was a boy that the Mayflower 

 passengers landed on the Rock. The memory of a man of 

 ninety-four is not likely to be correct in regard to words 

 spoken when he was a boy. Moreover, Faunce's father 

 was not a passenger on the Mayflower, and therefore he 

 did not tell this story to his son from a personal knowledge 

 of it being the landing. The wharf was built ; and the 

 Rock eventually became the doorstep of a warehouse. . . . 

 The only record of the first landing is in these words : 

 'They sounded ye harbor & founde it fitt for shipping, and 

 marched into ye land & found diverse cornfeilds & little Tun- 

 ing brooks, a place fitt for situation ; at least it was ye best 

 they could find.' From what point on the shore the men 

 who were prospecting for the colony 'marched into ye 

 land' is not known. Romance and a vague tradition have 

 designated this Rock, the only boulder on the shore ; but 

 its remoteness from the island seems to forbid the supposi- 

 tion that the shallop went so far away from its direct course 

 to find a landing-place. And yet there is some reason for 

 believing the story of the Rock. Faunce was born in the 

 year 1647." Therefore, until he was forty years old, some 

 of the passengers on the Mayflower, including John Alden, 

 survived. " When Faunce related his story the landing 

 was not so ancient an event as to have lost its traditionary 

 details ; and he may have told what was already known to 

 others, who, feeling that whether their ancestors landed on 

 a rock or on the beach was a matter of no importance, did 

 not trouble themselves to come forth and confirm Faunce's 

 story." 



It is less than fifty years since popular attention and sen- 

 timent were directed to Plymouth Rock. Daily steamboats 

 brought streams of pleasure-seekers from Boston to Ply- 

 mouth long before the Rock was an object of attraction to 

 them. But now, says Mr. Bliss, modern pilgrims to this 

 stone "constitute a daily show which serves to entertain 

 the loungers who are sitting atop of Cole's Hill. . . . They 

 walk around the Rock ; they put their hands on it ; thev 

 gaze at it ; they spell aloud the inscription '1620'; they 

 step across it ; they stand still on it and make good resolu- 

 tions ; and I have seen respectable-looking men and 

 women meet on it and kiss each other." In short, it has 

 become more than a relic — a fetich, an object of popular 

 wonderment and adoration. "Elevated into the protection 

 of iron pickets and gates, sheltered from sun and rain by a 

 granite canopy, it has become to strangers and wayfarers 

 a curiosity as extraordinary' as a mermaid or a flymg-horse 

 would be." 



Burial Hill likewise gets more honor at the hands of 

 modern sentiment than history can prove it to deserve. 

 " It is not probable," says Mr. Bliss, " that any of the May- 

 flower passengers were buried in this hill. In John- How- 

 land's time, and long before, it was the custom to bury the 

 dead in the lands belonging to their homestead, where the 

 burial was done with no ceremony of any kind ; earth to 

 earth, without even a prayer. . . . Many of the Mayflower 

 company who died within the colony were probably bu- 

 ried in their own farms, and for this reason their graves 

 are now unknown. ... As the 'common house' in which 

 the colonists worshipped stood, until the year 1637, at the 

 foot of Cole's Hill, this hill became the churchyard accord- 

 ing to a custom of Old England." Four skeletons, exhumed 

 about fifty years ago from Cole's Hill, support the belief 

 that this, and not Burial Hill, was the first burial-place of 

 the colonists. " It has been said that graves on Burial 

 Hill were leveled and sown with grain to conceal from the 

 Indians the losses of the colony. The tender sentiment of 

 this poetic and oft-repeated statement is dispelled by the 

 fact that the neighboring Indians were friendly ; and if 

 they desired to know, it was easy to ascertain what the 

 losses had been by counting the heads of the survivors." 

 In 1637 a new meeting-house was built at the foot of Burial 



