PEOVINCETOWN. 
249 
Provincetowri is twice as far as from England to France*, 
yet step into the cars, and in six hours you may stand 
on those four planks, and see the Cape which Gosnold 
is said to have discovered, and which I have so poorly 
described. If you had started when I first advised you, 
you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh, 
and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to 
Face Point, some thirty miles, — for at every step we 
made an impression on the Cape, though we were not 
aware of it, and though our account may have made no 
impression on your minds. But what is our account ? 
In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth. 
We often love to think now of the life of men on 
beaches, — at least in midsummer, when the weather is 
serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach- 
grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their 
wealth a jag of drift-wood or a few beach-plums, and 
their music the surf and the peep of the beach-bird. 
We went to see the Ocean, and that is probably the 
best place of all our coast to go to. If you go by water, 
you may experience what it is to leave and to approach 
these shores; you may see the Stormy Petrel by the 
way, Sdkao-a-odpofjLa, running over the sea, and if the 
weather is but a little thick, may lose sight of the land 
in mid-passage. I do not know where there is another 
beach in the Atlantic States, attached to the mainland, 
so long, and at the same time so straight, and completely 
uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers or 
marshes; for though there may be clear places on the 
map, they would probably be found by the foot traveller 
to be intersected by creeks and marshes ; certainly there 
is none where there is a double way, such as I have 
described, a beach and a bank, which at the same time 
