14 
CAPE COD. 
seams of tlie rock like buttons on a waistcoat. It wa3 
one of the hottest days in the year, yet I found the water 
so icy cold that I could swim but a stroke or two, and 
thought that, in case of shipwreck, there would be more 
danger of being chilled to death than simply drowned. 
One immersion was enough to make you forget the dog- 
days utterly. Though you were sweltering before, it 
will take you half an hour now to remember that it was 
ever warm. There were the tawny rocks, like lions 
couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly 
dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities 
of gravel. The water held in their little hollows, on the 
receding of the tide, was so crystalline that I could not 
believe it salt, but wished to drink it; and higher 
up were basins of fresh water left by the rain, — all 
which, being also of different depths and temperature, 
were convenient for different kinds of baths. Also, 
the larger hollows in the smoothed rocks formed the 
most convenient of seats and dressing-rooms. In 
these respects it was the most perfect sea-shore that 
I had seen. 
I saw in Cohasset, separated from the sea only by a 
narrow beach, a handsome but shallow lake of some 
four hundred acres, which, I was told, the sea had tossed 
over the beach in a great storm in the spring, and, after 
the alewives had passed into it, it had stopped up its out. 
let, and now the alewives were dying by thousands, and 
the inhabitants were apprehending a pestilence as the 
water evaporated. It had five rocky islets in it. 
This rocky shore is called Pleasant Cove, on some 
maps; on the map of Cohasset, that name appears to be 
confined to the particular cove where I saw the wreck 
of the St. John. The ocean did not look, now, as if any 
