As I topped the rise I found myself in a hilltop pasture a half-mile long which covers the rest of the hill. Once it was a cultivated field, and the corn-hills of the last planter still show in spots, these, like the rest of it, now overgrown with close-set grass and crisp reindeer lichen. The patriarchal cedars I had left behind, old men of their tribe sitting solemn and motionless in council. Here I had come upon a vast but scattered concourse of young people, lithe and slender folk who seemed to stroll gayly all about the place. Here were plumed youths and debonair maidens regarding one another, family groups, mothers with children at the knee and other little folk in the very attitude of playing romping games. But there were tinier folk than these, too small to be real cedars, gamboling among the others, as if underworld sprites also in cedar guise had come forth to join the festivities. Nowhere else have I seen such a merry concourse of cedars as on the long top of this hill that some Pilgrim father first cleared for a cornfield two centuries and a half ago. Here and there little groups of wee wild rose shrubs seemed to dance up and scatter perfume about their feet in tribute, then stand motionless like diffident children, finger in mouth, stolid and uncommunicative. Hilltops are often lonely, but this one could never be. It gladdens with its quaint fancies. Through a veritable picnic of young cedars I tramped down the eastward slope to the dusty road that leads on to Green Harbor and the slumbrous uproar of the surf. [Illustration: “Telling the pearls on this rosary of a path one is led beyond the homestead.”]