The area in which I stayed for that brief nomadic period of my own, was filled with cottages, on slopes ending on the cliff above the beach, a majority unoccupied but with a house here and there showing a little more substance to it, the evidence of a year-round resident. With some exceptions, they were bare in appearance and devoid of individuality. No uncommon effort had been made to give them much distinction. In the winter and fall they lost whatever color by human association they might have had during the summer. Some of them were flat-roofed, pastel-painted little boxes without even the virtue of exposed wood, and since they were not in Florida they could not borrow any youth from the sunshine. Their spirit was old before they were built, and in that respect indigenous to the seashore. The bare coast and the gray waters seemed to hold them in contempt, or at least indifference, and they became as gray themselves. They are due credit for their lack of pretension, whether planned or not. They did not take up the landscape with improvements and cultivation. They sat on their own little plots of sandy ground, with a few pitch pines, Hudsonia and scrub oak, joining the general economy of the landscape, no blowing leaves and limbs above them, no spreading lawns around. Whoever might live in them after the mild, money-making season could be gripped by the real weather without interference. Our age may give the lie to all those who are interested in antiques, even if there are any old ones left. Perhaps there is no alternative if we have to get to the moon or bust. Will there ever be such a thing as an antique rocket? But there is still a flow of age, a distant sense of things that it is possible to find, hanging like mist over an inlet, booming like the sea over the far side of a hill. You can still walk the Old King’s Highway in some areas, a single-track road where it is easy to imagine a horse and wagon or a stage, during the years when it took two days to get to Boston and the sea route was the preferred one. Even with the jet planes droning overhead and the cars grinding gears in the distance and the about-to-break sound of the future in the sky somewhere ahead, it is as ancient and distinct as the outline of an oak tree. Just its narrowness is enough. I spent half one afternoon trying to find it in one part of its extent, and at last there it was, quite clearly, just the right size for the eighteenth century, with narrow ruts in sandy ground, lowered, indented, washed out in some places, grown over in others, but a ghost with definition.