THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 
81 
described; and he would have had me believe that there 
was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered the 
purpose. I suggested that he should connect his two 
ankles by a string of the proper length, which should be 
the chord of an arc, measuring his jumping ability on 
horizontal surfaces, — assuming one leg to be a perpen¬ 
dicular to the plane of the horizon, which, however, may 
have been too bold an assumption in this case. Never¬ 
theless, this was a kind of geometry in the legs which it 
interested me to hear of. 
Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the 
ponds, most of which we could see from his windows, 
and making us repeat them after him, to see if we 
had got them right. They were Gull Pond, the largest 
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more 
than a mile in circumference, Newcomb's, Swett’s, 
Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and Herring Ponds, all 
connected at high water, if I do not mistake. The 
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he 
told them of one which they had not detected. He said 
that they were not so high as formerly. There was an 
earthquake about four years before he was born, which 
cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and 
caused them to settle. I did not remember to have read 
of this. Innumerable gulls used to resort to them; but 
the large gulls were now very scarce, for, as he said, the 
English robbed their nests far in the north, where they 
breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in 
the gull-house, and when small birds were killed by 
means of a frying-pan and fire at night. His father 
once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party 
from Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, 
o^^e dark night, on Billingsgate Island, twenty horses 
