THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 
181 
where shipwrecked men would be in danger of perish¬ 
ing in the night, we came down upon the eastern ex¬ 
tremity of the four planks which run the whole length 
of Provincetown street. This, which is the last town 
on the Cape, lies mainly in one street along the curving 
beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills, covered 
with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, 
rose immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, 
which is from half a mile to a mile or more wide in the 
middle, and beyond these is the desert, which is the 
greater part of its territory, stretching to the sea on the 
east and west and north. The town is compactly built 
in the narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between 
the harbor and the sand-hills, and contained at that time 
about twenty-six hundred inhabitants. The houses, in 
which a more modern and pretending style has at length 
prevailed over the fisherman’s hut, stand on the inner or 
plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, 
with the picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, 
on the water side. The narrow portion of the beach 
between forming the street, about eighteen feet wide, the 
only one where one carriage could pass another, if there 
was more than one carriage in the town, looked much 
“heavier” than any portion of the beach or the desert 
which we had walked on, it being above the reach of the 
highest tide, and the sand being kept loose by the occa¬ 
sional passage of a traveller. We learned that the four 
planks on which we were walking had been bought by the 
town’s share of the Surplus Revenue, the disposition of 
which was a bone of contention between the inhabitants, 
till they wisely resolved thus to put it under foot. Yet 
some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not 
receive their particular share in money, that they per- 
