ACEOSS THE CAPE. 
127 
fowii, and in 1855, a Truro boy ten years old told me 
that he had never seen one. They were formerly pas¬ 
tured on the unfenced lands or general fields, but now 
the owners were more particular to assert their rights, 
and it cost too much for fencing. The rails are cedar 
from Maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary pur¬ 
poses, but four are required for sheep. This was the 
reason assigned by one who had formerly kept them for 
not keeping them any longer. Fencing stuff is so ex¬ 
pensive that I saw fences made with only one rail, 
and very often the rail when split was carefully tied 
with a string. In one of the villages I saw the next 
summer a cow tethered by a rope six rods long, the rope 
long in proportion as the feed was short and thin. Sixty 
rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been no 
more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she 
would get into Arabia Felix ! I helped a man weigh a 
bundle of hay which he was selling to his neighbor, 
holding one end of a pole from which it swung by a steel¬ 
yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. In 
short, the country looked so barren that I several times 
refrained from asking the inhabitants for a string or a 
piece of wrapping-paper, for fear I should rob them, for 
they plainly were obliged to import these things as well 
as rails, and where there were no news-boys, I did not 
see what they would do for waste paper. 
The objects around us, the make-shifts of fishermen 
ashore, often made us look down to see if we were stand¬ 
ing on terra firma. In the wells everywhere a block 
and tackle were used to raise the bucket, instead of a 
windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar 
^r a plank or two full of auger-holes, saved from a 
wreck. The windmills were partly built of these, and 
