176 
CAPE COD. 
that they were contending patiently with adverse winds, 
beating eastward ; but we learned afterward that they 
were even then on their fishing-ground, and that they 
caught mackerel without taking in their mainsails or 
coming to anchor, “a smart breeze” (thence called a 
mackerel breeze) being,” as one says, “ considered most 
favorable” for this purpose. We counted about two 
hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc 
of the horizon, and a nearly equal number had disap¬ 
peared southward. Thus they hovered about the ex¬ 
tremity of the Cape, like moths round a candle; the 
lights at Race Point and Long Point being bright can¬ 
dles for them at night, — and at this distance they 
looked fair and white, as if they had not yet flown 
into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw 
how some had formerly singed their wings and bodies. 
A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are 
all ploughing the ocean together, as a common field. 
In North Truro the w^omen and girls may sit at their 
doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are 
harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, 
on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, 
just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes 
see their husbands working in a distant hill-side field. 
But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s 
ear. 
Having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the 
Cape, though still in Truro, for this township is about 
twelve miles long on the shore, we crossed over to 
the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to spend 
the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Province- 
town, called Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet 
above the ocean. On our way thither we had occasion to 
