114 
CAPE COD. 
Shakespeare’s Cliff and Cape Grinez, in France, is one 
hundred and eighty feet; and Guyot says that “ the Bal¬ 
tic Sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet 
between the coasts of Germany and those of Sweden,” 
and “ the Adriatic between Venice and Trieste has a 
depth of only one hundred and thirty feet.” A pond in 
my native town, only half a mile long, is more than one 
hundred feet deep. 
The ocean is but a larger lake. At midsummer you 
may sometimes see a strip of glassy smoothness on it, a 
few rods in width and many miles long, as if the surface 
there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil, just as on 
a country pond; a sort of stand-still, you would say, at 
the meeting or parting of two currents of air (if it does 
not rather mark the unrippled steadiness of a current 
of water beneath), for sailors tell of the ocean and land 
breeze meeting between the fore and aft sails of a vessel, 
while the latter are full, the former being suddenly taken 
aback. Daniel Webster, in one of his letters describing 
blue-fishing off Martha’s Vineyard, referring to those 
smooth places, which fishermen and sailors call “ slicks,” 
says: “We met with them yesterday, and our boatman 
made for them, whenever discovered. He said they 
were caused by the blue-fish chopping up their prey. 
That is to say, those voracious fellows get into a school 
of menhaden, which are too large to swallow whole, and 
they bite them into pieces to suit their tastes. And 
the oil from this butchery, rising to the surface, makes 
the ^slick.’” 
Yet this same placid Ocean, as civil now as a city’s 
harbor, a place for ships and commerce, will erelong 
be lashed into sudden fury, and all its caves and cliffs 
will resound with tumult. It will ruthlessly heave 
