80 
CAPE COD. 
Then why fence your fields ? ” 
To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the 
whole.” 
“ The yellow sand,” said he, “ has some life in it, but 
tlie white little or none.” 
When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was 
a surveyor, he said that they who surveyed his farm 
were accustomed, where the ground was uneven, to loop 
up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the 
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I 
could tell him why they did not come out according to 
his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to have more 
respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not 
wonder at. “ King George the Third,” said he, laid 
out a road four rods wide and straight the whole length 
of the Cape,” but where it was now he could not tell. 
This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long- 
Islander, who once, when I had made ready to jump 
from the bow of his boat to the shore, and he thought 
that I underrated the distance and would fall short, — 
though I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity 
of my joints by his own, — told me that when he came 
to a brook which he wanted to get over, he held up one 
leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any part 
of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. 
‘‘ Why,” I told him, “ to say nothing of the Mississippi, 
and other small watery streams, I could blot out a star 
with my foot, but I would not engage to jump that dis¬ 
tance,” and asked how he knew when he had got his leg 
at the right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no 
less accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordi¬ 
nary quadrant, and appeared to have a painful recollec¬ 
tion of every degree and minute in the arc which they 
