But if any one reading the tale of these wilful dwellings should soberly doubt the common interests of the people, let him climb the rocky eminence in their midst to the old graveyard, where stood the little church, the oldest of all; here the first settlers worshipped, and here, in comforting nearness, they buried their dead, within the niches spared them by the rock. It was set thus high, this homely tabernacle of faith, to overlook land and water, that no stealthy Indian band might creep upon the worshippers unaware,—for those were the days of the church militant in more than a poetic sense. An admirable spot this for the antiquary, wherein to pursue his loving labor of coaxing forward a reluctant past! Ancient headstones will salute his eye, and of these said one local lingerer, garrulous as he who discoursed on Yorick’s skull, “I can tell the date of ’em all, jest as I could a buildin’, by the architectur’!” But let him not conclude that in scanning the slabs erected two centuries ago he has seen all,—for here lies many an unrecorded grave. “They had to send to England for their stones then,” said the Oldest Inhabitant. “Poor folks couldn’t afford that, an’ most of ’em went without.” [Illustration: “The wild azalea”] [Illustration: “The blackberry clings and crowds”] [Illustration: Butterfly] Across the little harbor, at nightfall populous with white sails, stretches the “Neck,” once a lonely, rock-defended treasury of beauty, besieged by wave, and alternately lashed and caressed by the fickle, but persistent foam. Well fitted are its girdling citadels for enduring warfare; their towers outlast the feet that climb them, and their masonry crumbles not below, save slowly, through the infinite patience of the eternally tossing sea. And when the eye tired of this majesty of the illimitable, when it wearied of ocean spray, spouting column-like through some gigantic cleft, and found itself oppressed by the rhythm of rolling foam, what would it have seen, on turning inland from Castle Rock, that century and a half agone? A stretch of green pasture-land, becoming yellow as August marches on,—the “Neck” itself. Then, wandering on unwearied, still traversing the “Neck,” sweet, bosky hollows, where lie to-day such treasures of shining leaf and soft-lipped flower as Paradise might claim. These are the wild, sunken gardens on the road to Devereux, glowing in the gold of a royal tansy, greenly odorous of fern, and sweet with the wild azalea,—honey-smeared and pollen-powdered, loved of the bee, and his chief tempter to drunken revels on the way from market. The button-bush holds aloft her sign of cool white balls; loosestrife stars the green undergrowth with yellow; and over stick and stone the blackberry clings and crowds. There the wild rose lives and blooms, fed on manna brought by roving winds and fleeting sunlight, never unblest, even when the purveyors of honey come winging by, to rifle her sweets, and leave her to the ripening of