The village is bounded by wooded hills, and a drive oceanward brings us to the dunes where the State, year after year, has waged war with the drifting sand of its Province Lands. Life-saving stations and beacons are set at short intervals, and are needed, on this shore, and out there lie the great shoals of the Peaked Hill Bar, the cruellest of all the coast, where ship after ship has piled her bones, and men by the hundred have gone to their death. To the eye, in a crisp north wind, they present only lines of vivid jade-green water set in the wide field of blue; and here sea and shore give such promise of variety as makes one long to watch the seasons through in sun and storm and shrouding mists. The dunes that are no other color than that of sand, ever responsive to the changing mood of the atmosphere, are covered now and then by carpets of growth that run from dull green to the purple of winter; and they and the bluffs beyond them are no more constant in aspect than their neighbor the sea. Far from depressing the spirit, they stimulate keen anticipation of what the hour shall bring forth and a sense that whatever its fruit one shall be great enough to share it. Of all the places one has seen here it is most fitting that man should dare to be free. III From the slender tip of Champlain’s Cap Blanc to Wareham one is never out of sight of water: salt here and salt there, ocean and inlet and bay; and the great ponds of the uplands, or deep in its swampy covert a lake dropped from the jewelled chain among the hills. In the towns nearer the mainland are creeks and brooks and tiny runlets, flooded cranberry swamps, a ditch choked with the lush growth it nourishes; or near the beach a peat bog may wink unexpectedly from its bosky rim where a colony of night heron have nested to be near their feeding-ground in the bay. And when the tide is at ebb they and the seagulls wheel out there in airy platoons that manœuvre as if to catch the light on their ermine or sleek surtouts of gray. On the drying sands the gulls teeter about like high-heeled ladies on an esplanade until a stranded minnow changes the play and they pounce and cuff and scream like boys greedy for a penny. There are rich harvests for the hungry on these wide reaches of the sandflats, and even a glutton bird could gorge his fill upon the prey entrapped in the fish-weirs that dot the inner coast.