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Updated: June 7, 2025
There was already a well-worn little footpath between the old Gale house and Sunday Cove; it wound in and out among the ledges and thickets, and over the short sheep-turf of the knolls; and there was a scent of sweet-brier here, and of raspberries there, and of the salt water and the pines, and the juniper and bayberry, all the way.
The exciting problem was solved, and we turned our feet homeward over the hills, across the fields and by stone walls; shying a stone now and then into some gnarled apple tree, just to knock down a wild apple or two, to try if they contained, as Emerson has said of one of them, "a pint of cider and a barrel of wind"; whipping off the heads of the wild daisies with our canes and switches; pulling sprigs of sweet fern and bayberry; mocking the crows and the cat-birds; finding choice flowers, and trying to fill the aching void within us with blackberries and whortleberries, and reaching the farm after the dinner was over.
These pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance a true New England incense that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers. Some parsons could not afford always to use candles.
But there is rich red blood in Hester, and the flavor of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phoebe! The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling in the natural soil.
Neither did you tell me of the thistles that flank the bayberry hedge. I never realized what a thing of beauty a thistle might be when encouraged and allowed room to develop.
The rest of the vegetation was more or less familiar, I believe: the obtuse-leaved milkweed, of which I had never seen so much before; three sorts of goldenrod, including abundance of the fragrant odora; two kinds of yellow gerardia, and, in the lower lands at the western end of the valley, the dainty rose gerardia, just now coming into bloom; the pretty Polygala polygama, pretty, but not in the same class with the rose gerardia; ladies' tresses; bayberry; sweet fern; crisp-leaved tansy; beach grass; huckleberry bushes, for whose liberality I had frequent occasion to be thankful; bear oak; chinquapin; chokeberry; a single vine of the Virginia creeper; wild carrot; wild cherry; the common brake, these and doubtless many more were there, for I made no attempt at a full catalogue.
How sweet and cool are these winding ways in the wonderful woods, overrun with vegetation, the bayberry, the sweet-fern, the wild roses, wood-lilies, and ferns! and it is ever a fresh surprise at a turn to find one's self so near the sea, and to open out an entrancing coast view, to emerge upon a promontory and a sight of summer isles, of lighthouses, cottages, villages Marblehead, Salem, Beverly.
She drove the guests to their chambers by the method of turning off the electric light in the general sitting room at a quarter past ten. Each room was furnished with a bayberry candle, and she announced that the electricity all over the house would be switched off at eleven o'clock. "That is late enough for any decent body to be up," she announced in her decisive manner.
At the top of that bluff, in the rear of a clump of bayberry bushes which shielded them from the gaze of possible watchers at the lighthouse, Nelson Howard and Lulie, walking slowly back and forth, saw it rise. Nelson told her the good news he had mentioned in his letter. It was that he had been offered a position as operator at the great wireless station in Trumet.
A soft wind blows out of the west. The northern part of Appledore Island is an interesting place to wander. There are no trees, but the plateau is far from barren. The gray rocks crop out among bayberry and huckleberry bushes, and the wild rose, very large and brilliant in color, fairly illuminates the landscape, massing its great bushes.
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