Other interesting records of past time may be read in Stumpy Cove, which is still the wildest and most secluded of spots, though the trolley tripper has found the pond and builds his bungalows on its shore, sinks his tin cans in its waters, and scares the bullfrogs with his phonograph. The tin cans will not last long, however. Fresh water in motion is continually giving up oxygen, and this with the humic acid of the mud bottom will soon scatter these disfigurations in scales of brown oxide. But all these solvent forces, acting through two centuries, have had little effect on the stumps of Stumpy Cove. The heart-wood is still sound, their interlaced roots tell the story of what happened on the spot in the rich muck of the swamp, as Stumpy Cove was then, before Myles Standish had set foot on Plymouth Rock or the first white man had spied inland from the summit of Blue Hill. For the pond as it is now is only about a hundred years old. For a hundred years before that it was a meadow, flowed occasionally by the farmers of the region about it. Before that Stumpy Cove was a great white-cedar swamp and the great white cedars stood in it, two feet in diameter, their clean straight trunks running up fifty feet or more without a knob or limb. This natural meadow with hay for their cattle for the cutting, these cedar swamps with their century-old growth, were what attracted the first settlers to this region, and hardly had the dawn of the sixteenth century come over the Blue Hills before their axes were at work in Stumpy Cove and similar swamps all about, getting out shingle stuff for the Boston market. But whereas in all the other swamps the young cedars were allowed to grow in again for succeeding generations of woodsmen, here new conditions arose. The meadow was flowed intermittently for a century; then the pond grew out of it. Not only might no seedlings find roothold there, but the very black muck in which they might grow was washed away from the roots of the great stumps. These, in the main, have endured, losing their bark and sap-wood, but with the heart-wood still firm after the lapse of two centuries.