plenty, as well as much other wild life,
should go over Maddeket way and sit on the shore of Long Pond.
There I found the bushy swales alive with marsh birds. Blackbirds
gurgled all about. The reedy shallows held many bitterns whose
sepulchral "Cahugancagunk, cahungancagunk" sounded ventriloqually
from the reeds. Coot, sea duck, loons, black duck, grebes, dotted
the surface of the pond and in all the sandy shallows spawning
alewives splashed and played--thousands of them. I had thought
spawning a serious business with fish, not to be entered upon
lightly or without due consideration. Yet these made a veritable
romp of it. And in the crystal clear air overhead, swept clean of
all city soot, soared a marsh hawk or two and an osprey. There was
more than clarity to this atmosphere. It had an elusive,
mirage-creating quality that made the osprey look startlingly large
as he soared near. It was enough to make one remember the roc that
Sindbad saw and get under cover. But he took an alewive instead of
me. All along the island in the steep of the sun the air had this
magnifying quality. It loomed the white headstones in the cemetery
on the hill back of the town till they seemed bigger than the town
itself, symbolic perhaps of how large a proportion of its former
glory lies here.

[Illustration: A Nantucket Lane]

Nantucket's one boat out at this time of year leaves at seven in
the morning. From its deck across its churning wake the most
conspicuous building is the old watch tower whose gilded dome
gleams friendlily. And as the beams of the morning sun strikes
this, like the tower of Memnon, it gives forth music, the
silver-tongued call of the old Lisbon bell. "Come back, come back,"
it cadences to all who pass, the melody clinking clear far over the
level sea. It seems the spirit of Nantucket born of its warm
spring sun, its soft winds and the friendly lives of the islanders
themselves, a pleading that echoes long in the memory and that few
can resist.

CHAPTER VII

FOOTING IT ACROSS THE CAPE

The Pilgrims might have been envied their discovery of Cape Cod if
they had come in the spring of the year. As it was, though they
hailed it with joy, it being land anyway, yet they must have found
it inexpressibly lonesome and spooky. To the newcomer it is apt to
be a ghostly sort of place at any time of year, unless mayhap he
be from some similar strand, for its rolling sand hills are swept
by winds that wail, and beate