ruit which is so common on the Cape
ought to have a name more significant of its delectability, but
perhaps the original sponsors ate it before it was ripe, or too
much. Hurts is short for hurtleberry, which is another way of
writing whortleberry, the correct old English form which we have
since corrupted into huckleberry. That Smith should, have classed
the Cape huckleberries as "such trash" is proper cause for a riot.

Two and a half centuries later came Thoreau, the very prince of
explorers, for he can take one over well trodden ways and through
familiar fields and show him India and the Arctic regions.
Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a sand hill.
Cape Cod was as full of romance of remote regions as was Concord.
He, too, notes the mirage. "Objects on the beach," he says,
"whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly
grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually
are. Later, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of
this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what
appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach fifteen feet
high and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it
proved to be low heaps of rags--part of the cargo of a wrecked
vessel--scarcely more than a foot in height." Thoreau felt the
eerie strangeness of beach and sand dunes as all explorers have,
and he noted, too, the characteristics of the sand and its
vegetation and of the inhabitants with a humorous minuteness.
Writing of the dunes, which seem always about to overwhelm
Provincetown, he says, "Some say that while the Government is
planting beach grass behind the town for the protection of the
harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in
wheel-barrows, in order to make houselots," which seems
characteristic of the beach grass, the harbor and the Cape Cod
spirit of making the most of real estate opportunities to this
day.

[Illustration: Along a Byway of the Cape]

"Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were," he goes
on, "by a myriad little cables of beach grass, and, if they should
fail would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom.
Formerly the cows were permitted to go at large, and they ate many
strands of the cable by which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh
set it adrift, as the bull did the boat that was moored by a grass
rope, but now they are not permitted to wander."

All of which would seem to prove that Th