ree miles had been added to Monomoy Beach during the
previous fifty years, and it is said to be still extending as fast as
ever. A writer in the "Massachusetts Magazine," in the last century,
tells us, that, "when the English first settled upon the Cape, there was
an island off Chatham, at three leagues' distance, called Webb's Island,
containing twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. The
inhabitants of Nantucket used to carry wood from it"; but he adds that
in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and the water was six
fathoms deep there. The entrance to Nauset Harbor, which was once in
Eastham, has now travelled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet
Harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass
between them. And so of many other parts of this coast.

Perhaps what the ocean takes from one part of the Cape it gives to
another,--robs Peter to pay Paul. On the eastern side the sea appears to
be everywhere encroaching on the land. Not only the land is undermined,
and its ruins carried off by currents, but the sand is blown from the
beach directly up the steep bank, where it is one hundred and fifty feet
high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit
on the edge, you will have ocular demonstration of this by soon getting
your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is worn
away. This sand is steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate, "more
than a hundred yards," says one writer, within the memory of inhabitants
now living; so that in some places peat-meadows are buried deep under
the sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a large
peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the bank covered
many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This accounts for that
great pebble of peat which we saw in the surf. The old oysterman had
told us that many years ago he lost a "crittur" by her being mired in a
swamp near the Atlantic side, east of his house, and twenty years ago he
lost the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it appearing
on the beach. He also said that he had seen cedar-stumps "as big as
cart-wheels" (!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off Billingsgate
Point, when leaning over the side of his boat in pleasant weather, and
that that was dry land not long ago. Another told us that a log canoe
known to have been buried many years before on the Bay side at East
Harbor in Truro, where the Cape