midnight
The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its right hand a tiny bay , where the ocean water made up amid picturesque rocks -- shaggy and solemn . Here trees of the primeval forest , grand and lordly , looked down silently into the waters which ebbed and flowed daily into this little pool . Every variety of those beautiful evergreens which feather the coast of Maine , and dip their wings in the very spray of its ocean foam , found here a representative . There were aspiring black spruces , crowned on the very top with heavy coronets of cones ; there were balsamic firs , whose young buds breathe the scent of strawberries ; there were cedars , black as midnight clouds , and white pines with their swaying plumage of needle-like leaves , strewing the ground beneath with a golden , fragrant matting ; and there were the gigantic , wide-winged hemlocks , hundreds of years old , and with long , swaying , gray beards of moss , looking white and ghostly under the deep shadows of their boughs . And beneath , creeping round trunk and matting over stones , were many and many of those wild , beautiful things which embellish the shadows of these northern forests . Long , feathery wreaths of what are called ground-pines ran here and there in little ruffles of green , and the prince 's pine raised its oriental feather , with a mimic cone on the top , as if it conceived itself to be a grown-up tree . Whole patches of partridge-berry wove their evergreen matting , dotted plentifully with brilliant scarlet berries .