THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 
141 
encroaoliing on the land. Not only the land is under 
mined, and its ruins carried off by currents, but the 
sand is blown from the beach directly up the steep bank 
where it is one hundred and fifty feet high, and covers 
the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit on 
the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this by 
soon getting your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves 
its height as last as it is worn away. This sand is 
steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate, “ more than 
a hundred yards,” says one writer, within the memory 
of inhabitants now living; so that in some places peat- 
meadows are buried deep under the sand, and the peat 
is cut through it; and in one place a large peat-meadow 
has made its appearance on the shore in the bank cov¬ 
ered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This 
accounts for that great pebble of peat which we saw in 
the surf. The old oysterman had told us that many 
years ago he lost a crittur ” by her being mired in a 
swamp near the Atlantic side east of his house, and 
twenty years ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but 
has since seen signs of it appearing on the beach. He 
also said that he.had seen cedar stumps “as big as cart¬ 
wheels” (!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off 
Billingsgate Point, when leaning over the side of his 
boat in pleasant weather, and that that was dry land not 
long ago. Another told us that a log canoe known to 
have been buried many years before on the Bay side at 
East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely nar¬ 
row, appeared at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape 
having rolled over it, and an old woman said, — “ Now, 
you see, it is true what I told you, that the Cape is 
moving.” 
The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and 
