Even this vast clay-bank is fast wearing away.
Small streams of water trickling down it at intervals of two or three
rods have left the intermediate clay in the form of steep Gothic roofs
fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp and rugged-looking as
rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously eaten out in the form of a
large semicircular crater.

According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both
sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods
within the last year, and erelong the light-house must be moved. We
calculated, _from his data_, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away
at this point,--"for," said he, "I can remember sixty years back." We
were even more surprised at this last announcement--that is, at the slow
waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken him to be
not more than forty--than at the rapid wasting of the Cape, and we
thought that he stood a fair chance to outlive the former.

Between this October and June of the next year I found that the bank had
lost about forty feet in one place opposite the light-house, and it was
cracked more than forty feet farther from the edge at the last date, the
shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. But I judged that generally
it was not wearing away here at the rate of more than six feet annually.
Any conclusions drawn from the observations of a few years or one
generation only are likely to prove false, and the Cape may balk
expectation by its durability. In some places even a wrecker's foot-path
down the bank lasts several years. One old inhabitant told us that when
the light-house was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it would
stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of fence
each year, "but," said he, "there it is" (or rather another near the
same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank).

The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere: for one man told me of a
vessel wrecked long ago on the north of Provincetown whose "_bones_"
(this was his word) are still visible many rods within the present line
of the beach, half buried in sand. Perchance they lie along-side the
_timbers_ of a whale. The general statement of the inhabitants is, that
the Cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on particular
points on the south and west, as at Chatham and Monomoy Beaches, and at
Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points. James Freeman stated in his day
that above th