128 
CAPE COD. 
they were worked into the public bridges. The light¬ 
house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told me 
casually that he had made three thousand good shingles 
for that purpose out of a mast. You would sometimes 
see an old oar used for a rail. Frequently also some 
fair-weather finery ripped ofi* a vessel by a storm near 
the coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw 
fastened to a shed' near the light-house a long new sign 
with the words “Anglo Saxon” on it in large gilt let¬ 
ters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could 
afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the 
same time with the pilot. But it interested somewhat 
as if it had been a part of the Argo, clipped off in passing 
through the Symplegades. 
To the fisherman, the Cape itself is a sort of store- 
ship laden with supplies, — a safer and larger craft which 
carries the women and children, the old men and the 
sick, and indeed sea-phrases are as common on it as on 
board a vessel. Thus is it ever with a sea-going people. 
The old Northmen used to speak of the “ keel-ridge” of 
the country, that is, the ridge of the Doffrafield Mountains, 
as if the land were a boat turned bottom up. I was 
frequently reminded of the Northmen here. The in¬ 
habitants of the Cape are often at once farmers and sea- 
rovers ; they are more than vikings or kings of the 
bays, for their sway extends over the open sea also. A 
farmer in Wellfleet, at whose house I afterward spent a 
night, who had raised fifty bushels of potatoes the pre- 
idous year, which is a large crop for the Cape, and had 
extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay 
in sight, in which he and his man and boy occasionally 
ran down the coast a-trading as far as the Capes of Vir 
ginia. This was his rnarket-cart, and his hired man 
