NANTUCKET IN APRIL 67 



so lone is the place. If it were not for the travel- 

 ling salesmen, a score or so of whom come in 

 with every boat, flood with their tiny tide the two 

 hotels that are open and ebb again the next 

 morning with the outgoing boat, there were even 

 less visible life at this season. Yet Nantucket 

 has today a permanent population of about three 

 thousand, which is swelled to thrice that number 

 when the summer hegira is at its height. That 

 means, including the island, which is at once all 

 one town and with a few tiny off-shoot islands 

 along its shore, all one county, the only instance 

 in Massachusetts where county and town have 

 the same boundaries. 



Geologically Nantucket is a terminal moraine, 

 a great hill of till which the once all-prevalent 

 glacier scraped from the mainland and dropped 

 where it now lifts clay cliffs and stretches sandy 

 shoals to the warm waves of the Gulf Stream. 

 Bostonians who know their geology should feel 

 at home in Nantucket, for, while it is superficially 

 allied to Cape Cod, the pebbles of the stratified 

 gravel on the north being in a large part derived 

 from the group of granite rocks known on the 

 neighboring mainland, perhaps half of the mass 

 being of that nature, the remainder is of the fel- 



