that
morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary amid the
weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and on going
to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahaug'a shell. He took up
both together, carried them home, and his wife, opening the shell with
a knife, released the duck and cooked the quahaug. The old man said that
the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a
certain part, which was poisonous, before cooking them. "People said it
would kill a cat." I did not tell him that I had eaten a large one
entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was tougher than a cat.
He stated that peddlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell
the women-folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a
better skimmer than _they_ could make, in the shell of their clams; it
was shaped just right for this purpose. They call them "skim-alls" in
some places. He also said that the sun-squawl was poisonous to handle,
and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but
hove it out of their way. I told him that I had handled it that
afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet. But he said it made the
hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched,--or if I
put it into my bosom, I should find out what it was.

He informed us that ice never formed on the back side of the Cape, or
not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it being
either absorbed or blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter, when the
tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the
back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One winter, when
he was a boy, he and his father "took right out into the back side
before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to dinner."

When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where I
saw so few cultivated fields,--

"Nothing," he said.

"Then why fence your fields?"

"To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the whole."

"The yellow sand," said he, "has some life in it, but the white little
or none."

When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a surveyor, he
said that those who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground
was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they
did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seeme