In late summer it is different. Out of the gray reindeer moss and poverty weed which are more prevalent than grass on the sands beneath these trees spire slender scapes of Spiranthes gracilis, the tiny orchid that someone named ladies’ tresses, not because the flower looks like them but reminds of them, being wayward and fragrant and lovingly blown by all winds. Here is goldenrod, and wee asters are just opening their baby-blue eyes to the approaching autumn. Wood warblers trill in the absurd forest, and the rich aroma of its leaves subtends the lighter fragrance of the blossoming wild flowers. In feathery glades among these Truro trees one might forget that winter is to come and bring bleakness and desolation unspeakable to the land with him. But if winter does not always warn, the sea does. Not so deep in any witch hollow can you hide, not so far may you wander in enchanted forests, as to escape its call. The trees murmur continually the song of the surf, and the crash of its breakers echoes continually in the air overhead. The wind song in the trees is not menacing, it is simply a minor melody, full of melancholy, as if it knew sad things and could but let them tinge its music. But even on quiet days when the south wind drifts gently in over the bay there sounds from the air above these mellow glades the growl of white-faced breakers that are never still on the northern shore. Out of the northeast they roll over gray-green leagues of cold sea, and as they bite deep into the sand of the shore behind Peaked Hill Bar, and drag it and all that is on it down into their maw and hurl it all back again, beating it on the beach and snatching it and beating it again, it roars inarticulate threats that make the onlooker draw back glad of a space of summer-dried sand between him and its depths. If this threatening undertone lingers in the ear even on a summer day with the wind warm and fragrant from the south, how must it have sounded to the Pilgrim explorers in a November northeaster?