180 
CAPE COD. 
rents in the rug. Coming from the country as I did 
and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this was per¬ 
haps the most novel and remarkable sight that I saw on 
the Cape. Probably the brightness of the tints was en¬ 
hanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this 
track. This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. 
We had for days walked up the long and bleak piazza 
w^hich runs along her Atlantic side, then over the sanded 
floor of her halls, and now w^e were being introduced 
into her boudoir. The hundred white sails crowding 
round Long Point into Provincetown Harbor, seen over 
the painted hills in front, looked like toy ships upon a 
mantle-piece. 
The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted 
in the lowness and thickness of the shrubbery, no less 
than in the brightness of the tints. It was like a thick 
stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as if a giant 
could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasselled fringe 
which trailed out on th^ sand, and shake it, though it 
needed not to be shaken. But no doubt the dust would 
fly in that case, for not .a little has accumulated under 
neath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape a? 
this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets ? 
Hereafter when I look on a richer rug than usual, and 
study its figures, I shall think, there are the huckleberry 
hills, and there the denser swamps of boxberry and 
blueberry: there the shrub oak patches and the bay- 
berries, there the maples and the birches and the pines. 
What other dyes are to be compared to these ? They 
were warmer colors than I had associated with the New 
England coast. 
After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climb¬ 
ing several hills covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, 
