THE BEACH. 
67 
building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight 
nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can 
bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which 
he may lie, or which he may burn in the fireplace 
to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been 
required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benevo¬ 
lent person who promised to inspect it annually, to see 
that the straw and matches are here, and that the boards 
will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks 
that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very 
night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their 
numbed fingers and leave half their number dead here 
by morning. When I thought what must be the con¬ 
dition of the families w^hich alone would ever occupy 
or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy 
of the winter evenings spent by human beings around 
their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for 
human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They 
appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew 
around and screamed over them; the roar of the ocean 
in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone 
resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year 
in year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. 
Houses of entertainment for shipwrecked men! What 
kind of sailor’s homes were they ? 
“ Each hut,” says the author of the “ Description of 
the Eastern Coast of the County of Barnstable,” stands 
on piles, is eight feet long, eight feet wide, and seven 
feet high; a sliding door is on the south, a sliding 
shutter on the west, and a pole, rising fifteen feet above 
the top of the building, on the east. Within it is sup¬ 
plied either with straw or hay, and is further accommo¬ 
dated with a bench.” They have varied little from this 
