202 
CAPE COD. 
surprise that he could distinguish her from other vessels 
so far, he said that there were not so many of those 
two-topsail schooners about but that he could tell her 
Palfrey said, in his oration at Barnstable, the duck does 
not take to the water with a surer instinct than the 
Barnstable boy. [He might have said the Cape Cod 
boy as well.] He leaps from his leading-strings into 
the shrouds, it is but a bound from the mother’s lap 
to the masthead. He boxes the compass in his infant 
soliloquies. He can hand, reef, and steer by the time 
he flies a kite. 
This was the very day one would have chosen to sit 
upon a hill overlooking sea and land, and muse there. 
The mackerel fleet was rapidly taking its departure, one 
schooner after another, and standing round the Cape, 
like fowls leaving their roosts in the morning to disperse 
themselves in distant fields. The turtle-like sheds of the 
salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills, 
immediately behind the town, and their now idle wind¬ 
mills lined the shore. It was worth the while to see by 
what coarse and simple chemistry this almost necessary 
of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman, and a 
single apprentice to do the chores for a large establish¬ 
ment. It is a sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the 
sunniest season ; more interesting than gold or diamond¬ 
washing, which, I fancy, it somewhat resembles at a dis¬ 
tance. In the production of the necessaries of life Na¬ 
ture is ready enough to assist man. So at the potash 
works which I have seen at Hull, where they burn the 
stems of the kelp and boil the ashes. Yerily, chemistry 
is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen 
raw Irishmen in the laboratory. It is said, that owing 
to the reflection of the sun from the sand-hills, and there 
