ACROSS THE CAPE. 
121 
nile distance. The bird may have been in the next 
field, though it sounded a mile off. 
To-day we were walking through Truro, a town of 
about eighteen hundred inhabitants. We had already 
come to Pamet River, which empties into the Bay. 
This was the limit of the Pilgrims’ journey up the Cape 
from Provincetown, when seeking a place for settlement. 
It rises in a hollow within a few rods of the Atlantic, 
and one who lives near its source told us that in high 
tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and waves 
preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the 
whole river is steadily driven westward butt-end fore¬ 
most,— fountain-head, channel, and light-house at the 
mouth, all together. 
Early in the afternoon we reached the Highland 
Light, whose white tower we had seen rising out of the 
bank in front of us for the last mile or two. It is four¬ 
teen miles from the Nauset Lights, on what is called the 
Clay Pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the 
Atlantic, and, as the keeper told us, stretching quite 
across the Cape, which is here only about two miles 
wide. We perceived at once a difference in the soil, for 
there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight 
appearance of a sod under our feet, such as we had not 
seen for the last two days. 
After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we ram¬ 
bled across the Cape to the Bay, over a singularly bleak 
and barren looking country, consisting of rounded hills 
and hollows, called by geologists diluvial elevations and 
depressions, — a kind of scenery which has been com¬ 
pared to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden 
a transition. There is a delineation of this very land¬ 
scape in Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology of Massa- 
6 
