t that is
not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to
seek what no other man has found or can find,--not be Chatham men,
dragging for anchors.

The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were
a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the
midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal
eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has
witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with
open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of
Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John was wrecked at
Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the Clay Pounds. They were
those of a man and a corpulent woman. The man had thick boots on, though
his head was off, but "it was along-side." It took the finder some weeks
to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man and wife, and whom God had
joined the ocean-currents had not put asunder. Yet by what slight
accidents at first may they have been associated in their drifting! Some
of the bodies of those passengers were picked up far out at sea, boxed
up and sunk; some brought ashore and buried. There are more consequences
to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice. The Gulf Stream may return
some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of
ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their
bones.--But to return to land again.

In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer two hundred holes
of the bank-swallow within a space six rods long, and there were at
least one thousand old birds within three times that distance,
twittering over the surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts
with the beach before. One little boy who had been a-bird's-nesting had
got eighty swallows' eggs for his share. Tell it not to the Humane
Society! There were many young birds on the clay beneath, which had
tumbled out and died. Also there were many crow-blackbirds hopping about
in the dry fields, and the upland plover were breeding close by the
light-house. The keeper had once cut off one's wing while mowing, as she
sat on her eggs there. This is also a favorite resort for gunners in the
fall to shoot the golden plover. As around the shores of a pond are seen
devil's-needles, butterflies, etc., so here, to my surprise, I saw at
the same season great devil's-needles of a size propor