yan is still common parlance in these old New England regions. The tenderfoot may suddenly sink to his hips in a draining ditch, overgrown at the surface, while the experienced may walk about safely.

The flora of this region is more varied, although most of the ground is covered with but three grasses:-a short slender relation of the thatch, sometimes called fox grass, a seaspear grass and a spike grass. None of these grows much beyond a foot in height. These three are the chief components of the marsh hay, which in this era of the gasoline engine is not so assiduously and thoroughly harvested as in the days gone by.

The

In cutting the grass, which is done in August at periods of a low run of tides, mowing machines are used, except in the lower, softer places, where the scythes are swung. horses wear broad, wooden marsh shoes, and a novice horse is practised in the security of the barn-yard with the awkward, clanking things before he is ventured on the unstable marsh. It is no trifle for a pair of horses to become mired in the salt marsh, and only those men born and bred to the work can manage them in that treacherous region. The hay

is piled in small cocks, under which are thrust two long poles. These serve like the handles of a Sedan chair for the removal of the hay to the higher land beyond the reach of the tides.

Hay boats, or canoes as they are inappropriately called, are also used to harvest the hay. These are long, narrow, flat-bottomed, square-ended scows that work in pairs covered with a broad platform, on which the hay is piled. With great sweeps, long unwieldy oars, the haymakers slowly urge them along the winding creeks, while the steersman, with a huge oar resting on a supporting oar-lock in the stern, directs their course. In many places the hay is piled in huge stacks, that are elevated above the highest tides on small piles or "staddles," as they are called, and the stacks dot the marsh for miles like clustered tents. When the marsh is fast bound by winter frost the farmer goes his rounds and carries off the savory, salty hay on sledges, his horses' iron shoes now well sharpened. No need of wooden marsh shoes; all is hard and solid as the rocky ledges.

Nearly all the farms of this region, even those several miles from the marshes, have

their patches of salt marsh, each reached by an ancient right of way. Most of the marsh hay is fit only for bedding, but when cut at the proper season and carefully harvested it makes valuable fodder for cattle.

Besides the fox, sea-spear, and spike grasses of the broad marshes, one comes on patches of a salt marsh sedge, which, with its sturdy brown bunches of fruit, grows in protected regions, while the seaside plantain with its narrow grass-like leaves is common everywhere. Another plant with narrow leaves, and therefore mistaken for a grass and called arrow grass, is common in this zone.

Perhaps the most striking plant, when it emerges from its inconspicuous green of summer, and changes in the fall to a modest red and later to a flaming scarlet, is the glasswort or samphire, a plant of universal distribution in salt marshes, both in this country and in Europe and Asia.

The sea milkwort, a humble saline member of the primrose family, surnamed glaux from its sea-green color, bears tiny flowers of pink and lavender, and grows prostrate or erect among the grasses.

Another marine plant of the salt marshes