d to
have more respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not
wonder at. "King George the Third," said he, "laid out a road four rods
wide and straight the whole length of the Cape"; but where it was now he
could not tell.

This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long-Islander, who once,
when I had made ready to jump from the bow of his boat to the shore, and
he thought that I underrated the distance and would fall short,--though
I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity of my joints by his
own,--told me, that, when he came to a brook which he wanted to get
over, he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any
part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. "Why," I told
him, "to say nothing of the Mississippi, and other small watery streams,
I could blot out a star with my foot, but I would not engage to jump
that distance," and asked how he knew when he had got his leg at the
right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no less accurate than a
pair of screw-dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and appeared to have a
painful recollection of every degree and minute in the arc which they
described; and he would have had me believe that there was a kind of
hitch in his hip-joint which answered the purpose. I suggested that he
should connect his two ankles by a string of the proper length, which
should be the chord of an arc measuring his jumping ability on
horizontal surfaces,--assuming one leg to be a perpendicular to the
plane of the horizon, which, however, may have been too bold an
assumption in this case. Nevertheless, this was a kind of geometry in
the legs which it interested me to hear of.

Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of
which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after
him, to see if we had got them right. They were Gull Pond, (the largest
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in
circumference,) Newcomb's, Swett's, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and
Herring Ponds,--all connected at high-water, if I do not mistake. The
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of one
which they had not detected. He said that they were not so high as
formerly. There was an earthquake about four years before he was born,
which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused them
to settle. I did not remember to have read of this. Innumerable gulls
used to resort to them;