and that another man picked it up and planted it where it now grows.  The legend provokes a good many questions.  One would like to know whether this was the first case of female rebellion in Massachusetts against the common-law right of a man to correct a woman with a stick not thicker than his little finger—­a rebellion which has resulted in the position of man as the tourists saw him where the New Hampshire Amazon gave them a meal of victuals; and whether the girl married the man who planted the twig, and, if so, whether he did not regret that he had not kept it by him.

This is a world of illusions.  By daylight, when the tide was out, the pretty silver bay of the night before was a mud flat, and the tourists, looking over it from Monument Hill, lost some of their respect for the Pilgrim sagacity in selecting a landing-place.  They had ascended the hill for a nearer view of the monument, King with a reverent wish to read the name of his Mayflower ancestor on the tablet, the others in a spirit of cold, New York criticism, for they thought the structure, which is still unfinished, would look uglier near at hand than at a distance.  And it does.  It is a pile of granite masonry surmounted by symbolic figures.

“It is such an unsympathetic, tasteless-looking thing!” said Miss Lamont.

“Do you think it is the worst in the country?”

“I wouldn’t like to say that,” replied the artist, “when the competition in this direction is so lively.  But just look at the drawing” (holding up his pencil with which he had intended to sketch it).  “If it were quaint, now, or rude, or archaic, it might be in keeping, but bad drawing is just vulgar.  I should think it had been designed by a carpenter, and executed by a stone-mason.”

“Yes,” said the little Lamont, who always fell in with the most abominable opinions the artist expressed; “it ought to have been made of wood, and painted and sanded.”

“You will please remember,” mildly suggested King, who had found the name he was in search of, “that you are trampling on my ancestral sensibilities, as might be expected of those who have no ancestors who ever landed or ever were buried anywhere in particular.  I look at the commemorative spirit rather than the execution of the monument.”

“So do I,” retorted the girl; “and if the Pilgrims landed in such a vulgar, ostentatious spirit as this, I’m glad my name is not on the tablet.”

The party were in a better mood when they had climbed up Burial Hill, back of the meeting-house, and sat down on one of the convenient benches amid the ancient gravestones, and looked upon the wide and magnificent prospect.  A soft summer wind waved a little the long gray grass of the ancient resting-place, and seemed to whisper peace to the weary generation that lay there.  What struggles, what heroisms, the names on the stones recalled!  Here had stood the first fort of 1620, and here the watchtower of 1642, from the top of which the warder espied the lurking