28 
CAPE COD. 
well as rained, with driving mists, as the day before, 
and the wind helped us over the sand at a rapid rate. 
Everything indicated that we had reached a strange 
shore. The road was a mere lane, winding over bare 
swells of bleak and barren-looking land. The houses 
were few and far between, besides being small and rusty, 
though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and 
their door-yards, which were the unfenced Cape, were 
tidy; or, rather, they looked as if the ground around 
them was blown clean by the wind. Perhaps the scar¬ 
city of wood here, and the consequent absence of the 
wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do 
with this appearance. They seemed, like mariners 
ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of 
the land, without studying their postures or habiliments. 
To them it was merely terra firma and cognita^ not yet 
fertilis 2 ccAjucunda, Every landscape which is dreary 
enough has a certain beauty to my eyes, and in this in¬ 
stance its permanent qualities were enhanced by the 
weather. Everything told of the sea, even when we 
did not see its waste or hear its roar. For birds there 
were gulls, and for carts in the fields, boats turned bot¬ 
tom upward against the houses, and sometimes the rib 
of a whale was woven into the fence by the road-side. 
The trees were, if possible, rarer than the houses, ex¬ 
cepting apple-trees, of which there were a few small 
orchards in the hollows. These were either narrow and 
high, with flat tops, having lost their side branches, like 
huge plum-bushes growing in exposed situations, or else 
dwarfed and branching immediately at the ground, like 
quince-bushes. They suggested that, under like circum¬ 
stances, all trees would at last acquire like habits of 
growth. I afterward saw on the Cape many full-grown 
