THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 
175 
residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly van¬ 
ish as civilization advances, but the most populous and 
civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves. 
It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, 
in this respect. The Boston papers had never told me 
that there were seals in the harbor. I had always asso¬ 
ciated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish 
people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the 
coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. 
They were as strange to me as the merman would be. 
Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. 
To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of 
Noah, — to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an 
ark. 
We saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen 
riders, highest of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the 
cows from wading round, nothing to remind us that man 
was proprietor of the shore. Yet a Truro man did tell us 
that owners of land on the east side of that town were 
regarded as owning the beach, in order that they might 
have the control of it so far as to defend themselves 
against the encroachments of the sand and the beach- 
grass,— for even this friend is sometimes regarded as 
a foe; but he said that this was not the case on the Bay 
side. Also I have seen in sheltered parts of the Bay 
temporary fences running to low-water mark, the posts 
being set in sills or sleepers placed transversely. 
After we had been walking many hours, the mackerel 
fleet still hovered in the northern horizon nearly in the 
same direction, but farther off, hull down. Though their 
sails were set they never sailed away, nor yet came to 
anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as 
vessels in a haven, and we, in our ignorance, thought 
