Clark’s Island, still covered with its primeval cedars and with its northern headland unwasted and majestic, lay like a bower upon the great field of flowing water, and matched Saquish, still an island, but beginning to throw out tentative arms toward the Gurnet’s Head, where six hundred years before Thorwald, brother of Leif, wounded unto death by the savages, desired to be buried, with a cross at his head and another at his feet, directing that the headland should thenceforth be known as Krossness. Toward these yearned the loving arm thrown out by Manomet toward the Duxbury shore,--that arm now reduced to a barren sandspit, but then a green and fruit-laden peninsula; and within it glittered in the evening light the harbor, deep enough at that day to float not only the Mayflower, but Captain Pierce’s Lyon, which now lay snugly anchored there, while the governor’s barge rowed away toward the town, bearing Bradford and Winslow home with the jolly mariner as their guest. Blue smoke-wreaths floating idly upward from Plymouth cottages told of housewives busy with the evening meal, and upon the crest of Burying Hill a twinkling gleam now and again showed that Lieutenant Holmes did not suffer the brasswork of the colony’s guns to grow dim now that they had come under his care. But closer at hand than these things stretched the marshes, the beautiful Duxbury marshes with their grasses full grown and ripe, reposing under the sunset light like a fair garden, where great masses of color lay in harmonious contrast, and the heavy heads of seed bent, and rippled, and rustled to the evening breeze, murmuring sweet secrets that he carried straight out to sea and buried there. O man, man! Lay out your modern gardens, and mass your pelargoniums and calceolarias and begonias and salvias and the rest, in beds of contrasting color, and then, if you would note your improvement upon ancient methods, go in the autumn and look at the marshes of the Old Colony, laid out by Mother Nature before Thorwald selected Krossness first as his chosen home, and then his chosen grave.