THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 
185 
in Boston, March 3, 1859, according to the Boston Jour¬ 
nal, q. V. 
Nearly all who come out must walk on the four 
planks which I have mentioned, so that you are pretty 
sure to meet all the inhabitants of Provincetown who 
come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out 
yourself. This evening the planks w'ere crowded wdth 
mackerel fishers, to whom we gave and from whom we 
took the wall, as we returned to our hotel. This hotel 
was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the 
door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be 
divided between carving meat and carving broadcloth. 
The next morning, though it was still more cold and 
blustering than the day before, we took to the Deserts 
again, for we spent our days wholly out of doors, in the 
sun when there was any, and in the wind which never 
failed. After threading the shrubby hill country at the 
southwest end of the town, west of the Shank-Painter 
Swamp, whose expressive name — for we understood 
it at first as a landsman naturally would—gave it im¬ 
portance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore 
south of Pace Point and three miles distant, and thence 
roamed round eastward through the desert to where we 
had left the sea the evening before. We travelled five 
or six miles after we got out there, on a curving line, 
and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of 
pure sand, from the midst of which we could not see a 
particle of vegetation, excepting the distant thin fields of 
Beach-grass, which crowned and made the ridges toward 
which the sand sloped upward on each side; — all the 
while in the face of a cutting wind as cold as January; 
indeed, we experienced no weather so cold as this for 
nearly two months afterward. This desert extends from 
