ACROSS THE CAPE. 
123 
of the soil, says: ‘‘ The snow, which would be of 
essential service to it provided it lay level and cov¬ 
ered the ground, is blQwn into drifts and into the sea.” 
This peculiar open country, with here and there a 
patch of shrubbery, extends as much as seven miles, 
or from Pamet River on the south to High Head on 
the north, and from Ocean to Bay. To walk over it 
makes on a stranger such an impression as being at 
sea, and he finds it impossible to estimate distances in 
any weather. A windmill or a herd of cows may seem 
to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few 
rods, he will be close upon them. He is also deluded 
by other kinds of mirage. When, in the summer, I saw 
a family a-blueberrying a mile off, walking about amid 
the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher than 
their ankles, they seemed to me to be a race of giants, 
twenty feet high at least. 
The highest and sandiest portion next the Atlantic 
was thinly covered with Beach-grass and Indigo-w^eed. 
Next to this the surface of the upland generally con¬ 
sisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt, through 
which a scanty vegetation found its way up. It will 
give an ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if I 
mention that the next June, the month of grass, I 
found a night-hawk’s eggs there, and that almost any 
square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an 
eligible site for such a deposit. The kildeer-plover, 
which loves a similar locality, also drops its eggs there, 
and fills the air above with its din. This upland also 
produced dadonia lichens, poverty-grass, savory-leaved 
aster {Diplopappus linariifolius)^ mouse-ear, bearberry, 
&c. On a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster and 
mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be 
