Cape Cod

or another,-we turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a Hollow, discovered two or three sober-looking houses within half

pe, struck us agreeably,-as if each of the various occupants who had their cunabula behind had punched a hole where his necessities required it, and, according to his size and stature, without regard to outside effect. There were windows for the grown folks, and windows for the children,-three or four apiece; as a certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and another smaller one for the kit

comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more pretending o

tic gable wit

at the door of the first house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. In the meanwhile, we saw the occupants of the next one looking out the window at us, and before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her bulkhead, and went in again

cord from Bosto

iles by r

by railroad,

ear of Concord of

They hear the sound of heavy cannon across the Bay.] I am almost ninety; I am eighty-eight

confess that we wer

'll leave it to th

n taking our hats and bundles, and the old man contin

Isaiah says; I am all broken down this y

er mother, a fool, her son (a brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who

with the old man. They said that he was old and f

urs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-four years ago. She is eighty

en prudent for a man of his age. He said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he had much of it at

this: that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur,

your name

ll my name. My name is--. My great-grandfat

had acquired a competency in that bus

in the harbor, and the like, but the most common account of the matter is,-and I find that a similar superstition with regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,-that when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty th

e inhabitants of New Brunswick have noticed that "ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is very intense indeed, and when the bays are frozen over the oyst

ing to eat or

g to eat or drin

e oyste

much as

leet o

still indigenous and abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion for five or six years at least. And Buckland in his Curiosities of Natural History (page 50) says: "An oyster who has once taken up his position and fixed himself whe

I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for shelter and water. Moreover, Champlain in the edition of his "Voyages" printed in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42 degrees, about five leagues south, one point west of Cap Blanc (Cape Cod), and there they found many good oysters, and they named it "le Port aux Huistres" (Oyster Harbor). In one edition of his map (1632), the "R. aux Escailles" is drawn emptying into the same part of the

long the river-side at low tide that morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog's shell. He took up both together, carried them to his home, and his wife opening the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the quahog. The old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part which was poisonous, before they cooked them. "People said it would kill a cat." I did not tell him that I had eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was tougher than a cat. He

r blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter, when the tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the back side for some thirty miles, as smo

t barren-looking land, where I saw so f

fence yo

rom blowing and cov

, "has some life in it, bu

lbows; that was the allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to have more respect for surveyors o

"Why," I told him, "to say nothing of the Mississippi, and other small watery streams, I could blot out a star with my foot, but I would not engage to jump that distance," and asked how he knew when he had got his leg at the right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no less accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and appeared to have a painful recollection of every degree and minute in the arc which they described; and he would have had me belie

e he was born, which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused them to settle. I did not remember to have read of this. Innumerable gulls used to resort to them; but the large gulls were now very scarce, for, as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the north, where they breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house, and when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at night. His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party from Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on Billingsgate Island,

to obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham, that "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about Orford, in Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the seed

n his day. He once considered himself a pilot for all our coa

grafted from, but had never seen growing elsewhere, except once,-three trees on Newfoundland, or at the B

d man stood up and said in a loud voice, as if he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had been obliged to exert his authority there: "John, go sit down, mind your business,-we've heard you talk before,-precious little you'll do,-your bark is worse than your bite." But, without min

lf

which are worthy to have been the birthplace of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornf

versation was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or

ian hills the

oebus was on

ilence or wit

nies and the mother country first broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane, an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him, "Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch

as he sat on his horse."-"There, I'll tell you, this was the way with Washington." Then he jumped up again, an

ch pleased when we told him that we had read the same i

h my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty

akfast, and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there, having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She was on the bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on the beach, who had got a boat ready

one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six still clinging to the boat; I counted them. The next wave turned the boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the forecastle, the

e said, thought the prospect from the high hill by the shore "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in t

Why repeat wh

Nisi, quam fa

am latrantibus i

sse rates, et

as canibus lace

Relation of the landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown Harbor, these words: "We found great muscles (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well again." It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover,

hat we reminded him that he could quote Josephus to our confusion.-"I've thought, if I ever met a learned man I should like to ask him this question. Can you tell me how Axy is spelt, and what it

ty-five years for thi

ow is it spelt?" She said: "It

w do you

A c h, ach, s e

, do you know what it mean

"I never heard

nd they asked him what it meant, and he sai

schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. I also heard of

see an old man's legs before, and were surprised to find them fair and plump as an infant's, and we thought that he took a pride in exhibiting them. He then proceeded to make preparations for retiring, discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plainness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. We were a rare haul for him. He could commonly get

no hurry. I believe I have

id he; "I wish I ha

urt me," said

out the part that k

which rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old women are by nature more suspicious than old men. However, the winds howled around the house, and made the fire-boards as well

, and I turned about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her course, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was a low bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting that I might have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the hill,-which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea,-I immediately descended again, to se

-signs, that "the resounding of the sea from the shore, and murmuring o

its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching the shore before the wind. Also the captain of a packet between this country and England told me that he sometimes met with a wave on the Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which indicated that at a distance the win

g for

alked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said: "Don't hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried." I ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man's shots, but my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that the buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it; but he declared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had therefor

o the Universa

he asked, "Sons

raised from seeds that came out of the Franklin. They were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which he cult

d I, "he has

g all the while, but could see nothing,

ooped low enough to pick him out with his talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bus

ed under the eaves, he directed us "athwart the fields," and we took

en open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we learned that our hospitabl