The Inn at Orleans reminded me of that solitary albergo half way over the Pontine Marshes—the inside of the house a refuge from the barren loneliness without-though the solidifying salt air of the Cape was different enough from the nervous drowsiness of the malaria. I shall remember Orleans by its dispensation of sleep, for it seemed to me as if two nights had been laid over me like two blankets. Cape air, indeed, day and night, struck me as having a touch of "poppy or mandragora," and, please lay it to the climate if my letter weighs on your eyelids.

With a charming pair of horses and a most particularly native Cape driver, we started, after our breakfast at Orleans, to skirt the full petticoat which Massachusetts Bay drops southward from the projecting head of Cape Ann. The thirty miles to the point of the Cape was one day's work. An hour or so on our way we stopped to see the blown-down trunk of a pear-tree brought over from England by Governor Prince, which had borne fruit for two hundred and twenty years. It lay in an orchard, at the rear of a house as old as itself, and the present tenant sells its branches for relics. The direction of our driver, when we stopped before the door, may perhaps be usefully recorded as a guide to travellers, and I will try to spell it strictly after his unmitigated Cape pronunciation :—“" Git r-a-ight a-out, and step r-a-ight r-a-ound; it's the back p-a-irt of the h-a-ouse." The letter a, in the native dialect, seems to fill a place like the "bread at discretion" in a French bill of fare; and I was struck also with an adroit way

with a few crooked boards nailed together, a stick standing upright, and a rag tied to it, to adventure into the ocean? What loadstone first touched the loadstone? or how first fell it in love with the north, rather affecting that cold climate than the pleasant east, or fruitful south or west? How comes that stone to know more than men, and find the way to the land in a mist ?"

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CONTENTMENT HERE.

they have, of giving point to a remark by emphasizing unexpected words. This same driver, for instance, when we commented upon the worn and overworked look of the middle-aged females whom we met upon the road, replied, (and his voice sounded as if it came up through his nose and out at his eyes,) "y-a-es! they must work OR die!"

Around most of the dwellings, along on this shore of the Cape, there is neither tree nor shrub, and this gives to their houses an out-of-doors look that is singularly cheerless. One ship on an ocean horizon could not look more lonely. Even the greenness of the poor grass around the cottage is partly lost to them, for they cover it thinly with dead brush, literally to keep the soil from blowing away—so light and thin is the surface of loam upon this peninsula of sand.

Lying between the Atlantic and the stormy Bay so well known as the nose of the bellows of Newfoundland, it is probably but a bridge of wind, for the greater portion of the year. A few appletrees, which we saw in one place, told the story-the branches all growing horizontally from near the root, and sticking so close to the ground that a sheep could scarcely pass under them.

We ploughed sand, all along through Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro, seeing but the same scanty herbage, houses few and far between, flat-chested and round-backed women and noble-looking old men, and wondering, (I, at least,) at the wisdom of Providence in furnishing the human heart with reasons for abiding in the earth's most unattractive regions. "All for the best," of course, but one marvels to remember, at the same time, that the most fertile and beautiful land in the world, on the Delaware and Susquehannah, equi-distant from New York and easier of access, can be bought for half the price of these acres of Sahara.

The remainder of the Cape, from Truro to Provincetown, is the Venice of New England—as unlike anything else as the city of gondolas is unlike the other capitals of Italy-and deserves the other end of a letter. In the brevity of this, too, I take a certain vacation liberty, which I need, on the venerable and time-worn principle, that

แ "All work and no play,

Makes Jack a dull boy."

Yours, &c.

3*

LETTER FROM THE END OF CAPE COD.

Descriptive of the Last Few Miles of Cape Cod, and the Town at its Extremity.

Ar the point where I resume my sketch of Cape Cod, dear Morris, I could not properly date from "terra firma." The sand hills, which compose the last few miles of the way to Provincetown, are perpetually changing shape and place, andsolid enough though they are, to be represented in Congress-the ten-mile extremity of the Cape is subject to a "ground swell," for the sea-sickness of which even Congress has thought it worth while to prescribe. I must define this to you more fully, for, literally true as it is, it sounds very much like an attempt at being figurative.

Whoever travels between Truro and Provincetown, though he goes up hill and down dale continually, runs his wheel over the virgin sand, for, even the stage-coach that plies daily backward and forward, leaves no track that lasts longer than an hour. The republican wind, though blowing ever so lightly, commences

CURIOUS STAGE ROAD.

59

the levelling of an inequality as soon as raised, and the obedient particles of light sand, by a granular progression scarcely perceptible, are pushed back into the hole they were lifted from, or distributed equally over the surrounding surface. Most of the way, you are out of sight of the sea, and with this, and the constant undulation, there is little or no resemblance to a beach. Indeed it is like nothing with which we are familiar; for, down in the bottom of one of those sandy bowls, with not a blade of grass visible, no track or object except what you brought with you, a near and spotless horizon of glittering sand, and the blue sky in one unbroken vault above, it seems like being nested in one of the nebulæ of a star-a mere cup of a world, an acre large, and still innocent of vegetation. The swell of a heavy sea, suddenly arrested and turned to sand, in a series of contiguous bowls and mountlets-before a blade of grass had found time to germinate, or the feather of a bird to drop and speck the smooth surface-would be like it, in shape and superficies. The form, of this sand-ocean, changes perpetually. Our driver had "driven stage" for a year, over the route between Truro and Provincetown, and, every day, he had picked a new track, finding hills and hollows in new places, often losing his way with the blinding of the flying sand in a high wind, and often obliged to call on his passengers to "dig out"-a couple of shovels being part of his regular harness. It is difficult to believe, while putting down the foot in this apparently never trodden waste, that, but a few miles, either way, there is a town of two thousand inhabitants.

Nature, that never made a face without somebody to love it, has provided" something green" to vegetate in every soil, and there is an herbage called the beach-grass which will grow