136 
CAPE COD. 
its light at night, we passed through a graveyard, which 
apparently was saved from being blown away by its 
slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry- 
bushes to root themselves amid the graves. We thought 
it would be worth the while to read the epitaphs where 
so many were lost at sea; however, as not only their 
lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not 
identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we 
expected, though there were not a few. Their grave¬ 
yard is the ocean. Near the eastern side we started up 
a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild quadruped, if 
I except a skunk in a salt-marsh, that we saw in all 
our walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be 
called quadrupeds). He was a large, plump, shaggy 
fellow, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a white tip 
to his tail, and looked as if he fared well on the Cape. 
He cantered away into the shrub-oaks and bayberry- 
bushes which chanced to grow there, but were hardly 
high enough to conceal him. I saw another the next 
summer leaping over the top of a beach-plum a little 
farther north, a small arc of his course (which I trust 
is not yet run), from which I endeavored in vain to cal¬ 
culate his whole orbit: there were too many unknown 
attractions to be allowed for. I also saw the exuvice 
of a third fast sinking into the sapd, and added the skull 
to my collection. Hence I concluded that they must be 
plenty thereabouts; but a traveller may meet with more 
than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take an 
unfrequented route across the country. They told me 
that in some years they died off in great numbers by a 
kind of madness, under the effect of which they were 
seen whirling round and round as if in pursuit of their 
tails. In Craritz’s account of Greenland, he says: “ They 
