A few houses have boldly climbed the hill from the street below, but none has yet dared the very spot on the bare, red-gray summit where the irons that once helped support the gibbet rust, still firmly bedded in their holes in the rock. Over the ledges and down the hill to the southeast lies a little pond of sweet water that sparkles in the spring winds, cosily sheltered in the hollow and surrounded by the vivid green of smooth turf. But even this the long scorn of summer heat dries to a brown bog where sedges fight for the life remaining in the stagnant pool in its center. About this pond the barberry bushes have found a foothold in straggling clumps to bear little crosses of witch-pin thorns, and steeples of hard-hack blooms spire solemnly near it in summer. Potentilla and cudweed dare the slope toward the summit of Gallows Hill when the rain and sun are kind, and fragaria and violets and bulbous buttercup trail after, but even in the soft days of May the height where the witches were hung is desolate and forbidding. Yet it dominates the outlook upon the town as the story of the witchcraft delusion dominates the annals of it, as both will for all time. Yet, for all its bareness, the country about Gallows Hill has its golden days. These come in late June, when it seems as if the sun had wrought a miracle among the bleak ledges and along the treeless slopes. Everywhere then in the seemingly barren pastures springs up the shrubby, lanceolate-leaved genista, clothing them in a rolling sea of its golden bloom. For weeks then the hills are glad with a wonder of papilionaceous yellow blossoms that any other pastures, however prolific of beauty, find it hard to match. The same Puritans that cherished the witchcraft delusion brought this plant with them from England, the dyer’s greenweed, woadwaxen or whin, and as they passed on into history left it behind them. It has wandered far in the waste places in New England, but nowhere does it so clothe the hills and rough slopes with beauty as it does in the region about Salem. The thought of this, already pushing up through the sod, is best to take back to the city with one. As the good in the Puritans was far greater than their grim misdeeds, so this goes far to hide the bleakness of the ledges, as it seems striving to. Perhaps some day it will even overgrow and hide the iron in the summit of the hill where children play to-day, and make them forget the story of its tragedies which now they are so eager to tell to the visiting stranger.