All these are growths of the bottom lands, the hollows among the sand dunes back of the town. Within some of these are little fresh ponds in which grow waterlilies and the usual aquatic plants of such places. Here amid the prevailing wildness are many little beauty spots which, could the Pilgrims have come to them before the winter frosts had wrecked the vegetation, might have tempted them to stay. Passing on down the Cape you soon leave these behind and get into the higher dunes on the narrowest part where vegetation has little chance for its life. Here for a mile or two one might well think himself in Sahara. The sands, blown hither and thither and piled in fantastic shapes by the winds, are as clean as those of the beaten sea beach, as free from all suspicion of humus. Yet if you will cross Sahara in most any direction to the camel’s-hump hills which are scattered over its border as if a caravan had become petrified there, you will find the humps sprouting vegetation, a vegetation that is sparse, perhaps, but to your astonishment is glossy and luxuriant of leaf. More than one of these mounds represents a drawn battle between whelming sands, wind-driven, and a vigorous wild cherry tree. How such a tree finds its start in these shifting, scouring sands is a puzzle. Yet once started it is easy to follow with more or less accuracy the course of the war which lasts years. The winds take the young shoot for a nucleus and pile their sands all up about it, yet may not quite cover the very tip, for there the varying draft whirls the topmost sands away again. The sand really helps. It mulches the young plant and protects it from the winter cold and the gales, from the summer heat and the drought. Each year the thus protected plant grows joyously more straight shoots, to be whelmed again almost to the tips by the sand, and so the merry war goes on till finally we have a dune twenty-five or thirty feet high, with the trunk and larger branches of a wild cherry tree for a core, its smooth, hard-packed surface wreathed with green leaves and often bearing rich, dark fruit for the delectation of all who pass.