AMERICAN HARBOR, OR NATASHQUAN 



same plant at Truro, and later found it in 

 profusion on my own beach. Now I must 

 have been walking all over it every year, and 

 the only time I had really seen it was over 

 forty years ago." My friend devoted himself 

 to the classics in college. 



That afternoon I followed Audubon's steps 

 up the bank of the Little Natashquan River 

 to the falls. In the lower part of its course 

 there are brackish marshes of small extent. 

 I cannot call them salt marshes, for they lack 

 the characteristics of these common features 

 of the New England coast. Although a num- 

 ber of salt-marsh grasses grew there, — no- 

 ticeably a form related to our black-grass, — 

 silver-weed and even the blue iris and other 

 plants of brackish regions pushed their way 

 almost to the water's edge. In fact I have never 

 found any true salt marshes on the Labrador 

 coast, and do not believe that salt marshes of 

 any size can exist, except on a slowly sinking 

 coastline. In Massachusetts, where there are 

 good reasons to believe the coast has been 

 sinking at the rate of one or two feet a cen- 

 tury, extensive salt marshes abound. These 

 build up at the same rate so that their rela- 



61 



