ACROSS THE CAPE. 
knew kow to steer her. Thus he drove two teams 
a-field, 
“ ere the high seas appeared 
Under the opening eyelids of the morn.” 
Though probably he would not hear much of the gray- 
fly ” on his way to Virginia. 
A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape arc 
always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean 
highway or other, and the history of one of their ordi¬ 
nary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the 
shade. I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who 
was expected home in the beginning of the winter from 
the West Indies, but was long since given up for lost, 
till his relations at length have heard with joy, that, after 
getting within forty miles of Cape Cod light, he was driven 
back by nine successive gales to Key West, between Flor¬ 
ida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course 
for home. Thus he spent his winter. In ancient times 
the adventures of these two or three men and boys would 
have been made the basis of a myth, but now such tales 
are crowded into a line of short-hand signs, like an alge¬ 
braic formula in the shipping news. “ Wherever over 
the world,” said Palfrey in his oration at. Barnstable, 
“ you see the stars and stripes floating, you may have 
good hope that beneath them some one will be found 
who can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or Well- 
fleet, or Chatham Harbor.” 
I passed by the home of somebody’s (or everybody’s) 
Uncle Bill, one day over on the Plymouth shore. It 
was a schooner half keeled-up on the mud: we aroused 
the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thump¬ 
ing on the bottom of his vessel till he presented hinc self 
at the hatch-way, for we wanted to borrow his clam-dig- 
