58 
CAPE COD. 
itants call Hollows, run at right angles with the shore, 
and in the middle or lowest part of them a road leads 
from the dwelling-houses to the sea.” By the word 
road must not always be understood a visible cart- 
track. 
There were these two roads for us, — an upper and 
a lower one, — the bank and the beach; both stretching 
twenty-eight miles northwest, from JSTauset Harbor to 
Race Point, without a single opening into the beach, 
and with hardly a serious interruption of the desert. If 
you were to ford the narrow and shallow inlet at Nauset 
Harbor, where there is not more than eight feet of water 
on the bar at full sea, you might walk ten or twelve 
miles farther, which would make a beach forty miles 
long, — and the bank and beach, on the east side of 
Nantucket, are but a continuation of these. I was com¬ 
paratively satisfied. There I had got the Cape under 
me, as much as if I were riding it bare-backed. It was 
not as on the map, or seen from the stage-coach; bu^ 
there I found it all out of doors, huge and real. Cape 
Cod! as it cannot be represented on a map, color it as 
you will; the thing itself, than which there is nothing 
more like it, no truer picture or account; which you can¬ 
not go farther and see. I cannot remember what I 
thought before that it was. They commonly celebrate 
those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not 
those which have a humane house alone. But I wished 
to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to 
put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is 
land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a 
wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the 
only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all 
you can say of it. 
