120 
CAPE COD. 
one hundred or one hundred and fifty, ay, for aught 
they know, two hundred years old, have a ridicu¬ 
lously dwarfish appearance, which excites a vsmile in 
the beholder. The largest and most venerable which 
they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not 
more than twenty or twenty-five feet high. I was 
especially amused by the Liliputian old oaks in the 
south part of Truro. To the inexperienced eye, which 
appreciated their proportions only, they might appear 
vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but 
measured, they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens 
which a deer might eat up in a morning. Yet they will 
tell you that large schooners were once built of timber 
which grew in Wellfieet. The old houses also are built 
of the timber of the Cape; but instead of the forests in 
the midst of which they originally stood, barren heaths, 
with poverty-grass for heather, now stretch away on 
every side. The modern houses are built of what is 
called “dimension timber,” imported from Maine, all 
ready to be set up, so that commonly they do not touch 
it again with an axe. Almost all the wood used for fuel 
is imported by vessels or currents, and of course all the 
coal. I was told that probably a quarter of the fuel and 
a considerable part of the lumber used in North Truro 
was drift-wood. Many get all their fuel from the 
beach. 
Of birds not found in the interior of the State, — at 
least in my neighborhood, — I heard, in the summer, the 
Black-throated Bunting {Fringilla Americana) amid the 
shrubbery, and in the open land the Upland Plover 
{Totanus Bartramius), whose quivering notes were ever 
and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive, 
yet hawk-like scream, which sounded at a very indefi- 
