150 
CAPE COD. 
man, whose cable parted here two hundred years agoi 
and now the best bower anchor of a Canton or a Cali¬ 
fornia ship, which has gone about her business. If the 
roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, 
what rusty flukes of hope deceived and parted chain- 
cables of faith might again be windlassed aboard ! 
enough to sink the finder’s craft, or stock new navies 
to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn 
with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and 
alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, per¬ 
chance with a small length of iron cable still attached, 
— to which where is the other end ? So many uncon¬ 
cluded tales to be continued another time. So, if we 
had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should 
see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels 
in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding- 
ground. But that is not treasure for us which another 
man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other 
man has found or can find, — not be Chatham men, 
dragging for anchors. 
The annals of this voracious beach ! who could write 
them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor ? How many 
who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of dan¬ 
ger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal 
eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which 
a single strand has witnessed. The ancients would have 
represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more 
terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of 
Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John 
was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the 
shore at the Clay Pounds. They were those of a man, 
and a corpulent woman. The man had thick boots on, 
though his head was off, but “ it was alongside.” It took 
