g in behind the long surf-beaten sandspit
known, for some forgotten reason, as "Black Man's Point," continued to
the salt-water pond which was named "The Cove." A path led down from the
lighthouses to a bend in the "Crick," and there, on a small wharf, was a
shanty where Seth kept his spare lobster and eel-pots, dory sails, nets,
and the like. The dory itself, with the oars in her, was moored in the
cove.

A mile off, to the south, the line of bluffs was broken by another
inlet, the entrance to Pounddug Slough. This poetically named channel
twisted and wound tortuously inland through salt marshes and between
mudbanks, widening at last to become Eastboro Back Harbor, a good-sized
body of water, with the village of Eastboro at its upper end. In the
old days, when Eastboro amounted to something as a fishing port, the
mackerel fleet unloaded its catch at the wharves in the Back Harbor.
Then Pounddug Slough was kept thoroughly dredged and buoyed. Now it was
weed-grown and neglected. Only an occasional lobsterman's dory traversed
its winding ways, which the storms and tides of each succeeding winter
rendered more difficult to navigate. The abandoned fish houses along its
shores were falling to pieces, and at intervals the stranded hulk of
a fishing sloop or a little schooner, rotting in the sun, was a dismal
reminder that Eastboro's ambitious young men no longer got their living
alongshore. The town itself had gone to sleep, awakening only in the
summer, when the few cottagers came and the Bay Side Hotel was opened
for its short season.

Behind the lighthouse buildings, to the west--and in the direction
of the village--were five miles of nothing in particular. A desolate
wilderness of rolling sand-dunes, beach grass, huckleberry and bayberry
bushes, cedar swamps, and small clumps of pitch-pines. Through this
desert the three or four rutted, crooked sand roads, leading to and
from the lights, turned and twisted. Along their borders dwelt no human
being; but life was there, life in abundance. Ezra Payne, late assistant
keeper at the Twin-Lights, was ready at all times to furnish evidence
concerning the existence of this life.

"My godfreys domino!" Ezra had exclaimed, after returning from a drive
to Eastboro village, "I give you my word, Seth, they dummed nigh et
me alive. They covered the horse all up, so that he looked for all the
world like a sheep, woolly. I don't mind moskeeters in moderation, but
when they roost on my