LETTER FROM CAPE COD,

Noteworthy peculiarity of Cape Cod-Effects of Sand on the Female Figure -Palm of the "Protecting Arm"-Pokerish Ride through Foliage-Atlanticity of unfenced Wilderness-Webster's Walk and Study of MusicOutside Man in Lat. 41o-Athletic Fishing-Good Eating at Gifford's Hotel-American "Turbot”—Wagon Passage over the Bottom of the Harbor-Why there are no Secrets in Provincetown-Physiognomy of the People-Steamer to Boston, etc., etc.

In one peculiarity, Cape Cod presents a direct contrast to any other portion of our country :-The houses and their surroundings seem of an unsuitable inferiority of style, to those who live in them. In New York, as every body has remarked, there is nothing more common than a house by which the proprietor is dwarfed, if seen coming out of the door; and, all over the United States, there is great chance of a feeling of disappointment on seeing a rich man, if you have, unluckily, put up your scaffolding for an idea of him, by first seeing his house. Few dwellings on the Cape cost over one thousand dollars, yet there are many wealthy men who live in houses of this cost-men, too, whose families are highly educated, and whose sons and daughters visit

66

SAND INJURY TỎ THE BUST.

and marry in the best circles of society in Boston and New York.

Whether the sandy soil, which seems so unfavorable to ostentation, is also the enemy which the climate seems to contain, as well, for the proportions of the female bust, I can scarce venture to say; but flatness of chest in the forms of the feminine population of Cape Cod, is curiously universal. Those to whom I spoke on the subject, attributed it partly to the fact that the mothers of most of them had been obliged, in the absence of husbands and sons at sea, to do much of the labor of the farm, and all superfluities had of course been worked into muscle.

This is some

what verified by the manly robustness of the well-limbed sons of these Spartan mothers, but still it is unfortunate that the daughters, (as far as I could judge by their arms and shoulders,) seem to have inherited the loss without the elsewhere equivalent. One notices the same falling off in the women of the deserts of Asia, however, and I am inclined to think that the arid sand, which denies juices to the rose and lily, is the niggard refuser of what nurture the atmosphere may contain for the completed outlines of beauty.

The end of the Cape, which you see spread like a hand, upon the map, is hollowed like a palm. This concavity is about three miles across, and has one or two fresh-water ponds in it, and a growth of bushes and stunted trees. We drove across this, at sunrise on the day after our arrival, the broad wheels of our Provincetown wagon running noiselessly on the sand, and the only thing audible being the whirr of the bushes which swept the spokes and our shoulders as we went through. We had a fast tandem of black Narragansett ponies, and, as the foliage nearly met over the track before us, and we could see no road, and felt

ATLANTIC OF SAND.

67

none, the swift rush through the dividing bushes had, somehow, rather a pokerish effect. It was before breakfast, or I dare say, I should have thought of something it was like, in the post-breakfast world of imagination.

This bushy waste, of three miles square, with a populous town on its border, is, strangely enough, unenclosed and unappropriated, though the law gives to any one the acres he is the first to fence in. On the street of Provincetown, they pay three dollars a foot for a building lot, and, an eighth of a mile back, they may have acres for only the cost of fencing, yet no one cares for what might (with merely laying plank paths through the high bushes,) be turned into "grounds," that would at least be a relief from the bare beach. The local ideas of enclosure are probably formed from the deck of a vessel, and, if they can get thirty feet square for a house, they doubtless look on all the space around as a sandy continuation of the unfence-able Atlantic. For my own part, (agriculture aside,) I wish the rest of mankind were as unappropriative, and the rest of the out-of-town world as common property.

The object of our sunrise excursion was to see the beach at Race Point, the extremest end of the Cape, and three miles beyond Provincetown—a favorite resort of Webster's, we were told, and where, with his gun on his shoulder, he is very fond of a morning of sportsman idleness. The monotone of the measured surf is "thunderingly fine," on this noble floor of sand, and it would be easy to imagine that it was here the great statesman took the key-note of his tide-like diapasons of eloquence. It sounded as his eye looks and as his thoughts read. The lonely extremity of this far-out point is a fine place for a feeling of separation from crowds-the boundlessness of the ocean on one

hand, and the large-enough-ness of Massachusetts Bay on the other—and I pleased myself with getting as far into the Atlantic as the "thus far and no farther" of the water-line, and calling up a "realizing sense," (at the expense of a wet foot,) that I was the outside man of you all, for the space of a minute. One likes a nibble at distinction, now and then.

They have an athletic way of bass-catching, here, which would please me better than sitting on a low seat all day, as fishermen do, curled up like a scared earwig, and bobbing at a line. They stand on the beach and heave out the baited sinker as far as their strength will permit, and then haul in, dragging a powerful fish if the throw was a good one. This must be the best of exercise for chest and limbs, and the course, pleasanter than a seat on the wet thwart of a boat. I forget whether you are fond of fishing for anything smaller than subscribers, my dear Morris ?

footing on the smooth sand is, of

We came back at a round pace through the bayberry bushes, and found the best of Cape breakfasts awaiting us, a fried fish, which they call a turbot, commending itself to my friend's taste as a novelty of great delicacy and sweetness. This is not the English turbot, of course. It is a flat fish, taken with spearing, and seems to have something the relation to a flounder which a canvass-back has to a common duck. They are not sent away from the Cape, and you must go there to eat them.

There is no wharf running to deep water at this place, and, chancing upon low tide for our time of departure, we were obliged to drive over the muddy bottom of the harbor in a wagon, and, at horse-belly depth, take a row boat for the steamer. The tide, here, rises from twelve to sixteen feet, and Provincetown, this “gem of the sea,” is of course, half the time, set in a broad

MORTALITY AMONG SAILORS.

69

periphery of mud. The wind had been blowing hard all night, and our small boat beginning gave one of the ladies a premonition of a sea-sick passage to Boston. I had rather a sprinkly seat in the bow, but, as we bobbed up and down, I had a good backward look at the town, which, with the ascent of mud in the foreground, looked almost set on a hill. I hope to see Provincetown again. It is that delightful thing-a peculiar place. The inhabitants looked hearty and honest, and the girls looked merry. They keep each other in order, I hear, by the aid of the plank sidewalk-for there can, of course, be no secrets, where there is but one accountable path in the whole neighborhood. Everybody at Provincetown knows every time everybody goes out, and every time anybody comes in. This might abridge freedom in towns of differently composed population, but men who are two-thirds of the time seeing the world elsewhere, are kept liberal and unprovincial, and the close quarters of the town only bind them into a family with their neighbors. I have chanced upon the following statistic, by-the-way, as to the dangers to life which these hardy people incur, and it is worth recording:

"It is stated on the authority of a sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Vinton, that, from tables actually and carefully compiled, it is ascertained that threefifths of those who follow the sea die by shipwreck! This is a large, and we should say, extravagant estimate; if correct, however, it shows a degree of mortality among seamen, of which we had no previous conception. It is added that the average of deaths, annually, among this class, is eighteen thousand; and that in one winter alone, twenty-five hundred perished by shipwreck on the coast of New England."

This, which I found in a very pleasant book called "Notes on the Sea-shore," is followed by some valuable information, as to the preparation of the dishes for which Cape Cod is most famous. The author mentions that Daniel Webster is (in propria persona)