Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864




Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it
was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in
small quantities in storms. The fisherman sometimes wades in water
several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him.
When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and
is drawn out. The clam has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet at
New Bedford one day, watching some ducks, when a man informed me, that,
having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire
(_Salicornia_) and other weeds along the river-side at low tide that
morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary amid the
weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and on going
to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahaug'a shell. He took up
both together, carried them home, and his wife, opening the shell with
a knife, released the duck and cooked the quahaug. The old man said that
the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a
certain part, which was poisonous, before cooking them. "People said it
would kill a cat." I did not tell him that I had eaten a large one
entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was tougher than a cat.
He stated that peddlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell
the women-folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a
better skimmer than _they_ could make, in the shell of their clams; it
was shaped just right for this purpose. They call them "skim-alls" in
some places. He also said that the sun-squawl was poisonous to handle,
and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but
hove it out of their way. I told him that I had handled it that
afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet. But he said it made the
hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched,--or if I
put it into my bosom, I should find out what it was.

He informed us that ice never formed on the back side of the Cape, or
not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it being
either absorbed or blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter, when the
tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the
back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One winter, when
he was a boy, he and his father "took right out into the back side
before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to dinner."

When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where I
saw so few cultivated fields,--

"Nothing," he said.

"Then why fence your fields?"

"To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the whole."

"The yellow sand," said he, "has some life in it, but the white little
or none."

When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a surveyor, he
said that those who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground
was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they
did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed 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; but the large gulls were now very scarce, for,
as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the North, where they
breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house, and
when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at night.
His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party from
Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on
Billingsgate Island, twenty horses which were pastured there, and this
colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in the dark to
cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring beach, and
which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to sea and
drowned. I observed that many horses were still turned out to pasture
all summer on the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham, and
Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what he
called "wild hens" here, after they had gone to roost in the woods, when
he was a boy. Perhaps they were "Prairie hens" (pinnated grouse).

He liked the beach pea, (_Lathyrus maritimus_,) cooked green, as well as
the cultivated. He had seen them growing very abundantly in
Newfoundland, where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been
able to obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham,
that, "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about
Orford, in Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the
seeds of this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the
sea-coast. Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it." But the writer who
quoted this could not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable
County.

He had been a voyager, then?

Oh, he had been about the world in his day. He once considered himself a
pilot for all our coast; but now, they had changed the names so, he
might be bothered.

He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting, a pleasant apple
which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen growing
elsewhere, except once,--three trees on Newfoundland, or at the Bay of
Chaleur, I forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that he could
tell the tree at a distance.

At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in,
muttering between his teeth, "Damn book-peddlers,--all the time talking
about books. Better do something. Damn 'em, I'll shoot 'em. Got a doctor
down here. Damn him, I'll get a gun and shoot him"; never once holding
up his head. Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as
if he were accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had
been obliged to exert his authority there,--"John, go sit down, mind
your business,--we've heard you talk before,--precious little you'll
do,--your bark is worse than your bite." But, without minding, John
muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the table
which the old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and then
turned to the apples which his aged mother was paring, that she might
give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast; but she drew them away,
and sent him off.

When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills
between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace
of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the
hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely that I mistook him for a
scarecrow.

This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the
best-preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to
have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he
was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus who
listened to his story.

"Not by Haemonian hills the Thracian bard,
Nor awful Phoebus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard."

There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation,
for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when
Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day, when
the troubles between the Colonies and the mother-country first broke
out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane,
an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him,
"Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into
the ocean with a pitchfork as for the Colonies to undertake to gain
their independence." He remembered well General Washington, and how he
rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us
how he looked.

"He was a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and
resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg, as he sat on his
horse.--There, I'll tell you, this was the way with Washington." Then he
jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as
if he were waving his hat. Said he, "_That_ was Washington."

He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when
we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account
agreed with the written.

"Oh," he said, "I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my
ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide
awake, and likes to know everything that's going on. Oh, I know!"

He told us the story of the wreck of the Franklin, which took place
there the previous spring: how a boy came to his house early in the
morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel
in distress; and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, and then
walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there,
having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She was on the
bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on
the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no assistance on
account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea running. There
were the passengers all crowded together in the forward part of the
ship, and some were getting out of the cabin-windows and were drawn on
deck by the others.

"I saw the captain get out his boat," said he; "he had one little one;
and then they jumped into it, one after another, down as straight as an
arrow. I counted them. There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped
as straight as any of them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them
back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six
still clinging to the boat: I counted them. The next wave turned the
boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came
ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the
forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. They had seen
all that happened to the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst
breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were
left, but one woman."

He also told us of the steamer Cambria's getting aground on his shore a
few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who
roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the
high hill by the shore "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and
also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the
ponds. He spoke of these travellers, with their purses full of guineas,
just as our Provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods in the
time of King George III.

_Quid loquar?_ Why repeat what he told us?

"Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,
Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
Dulichias vexasse rates, et gurgite in alto
Ah timidos nautas canibus lacerasse marinis?"

In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam
which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was
no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a
plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At
any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by
it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to
read afterward, in Mourt's Relation of the Landing of the Pilgrims in
Provincetown Harbor, these words:--"We found great muscles," (the old
editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams,) "and very fat and
full of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick
that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well
again." It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a
similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was a valuable
confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every word
of Mourt's "Relation." I was also pleased to find that man and the clam
lay still at the same angle to one another. But I did not notice
sea-pearl. Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it. I have since dug
these clams on a flat in the Bay, and observed them. They could squirt
full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on
the sand.

"Now I am going to ask you a question," said the old man, "and I don't
know as you can tell me; but you are a learned man, and I never had any
learning, only what I got by natur."--It was in vain that we reminded
him that he could quote Josephus to our confusion.--"I've thought, if I
ever met a learned man, I should like to ask him this question. Can you
tell me how _Axy_ is spelt, and what it means? _Axy_," says he; "there's
a girl over here is named _Axy_. Now what is it? What does it mean? Is
it Scriptur? I've read my Bible twenty-five years over and over, and I
never came across it."

"Did you read it twenty-five years for this object?" I asked.

"Well, _how_ is it spelt? Wife, how is it spelt?"

She said,--"It is in the Bible; I've seen it."

"Well, how do you spell it?"

"I don't know. A c h, ach, s e h, seh,--Achseh."

"Does that spell Axy? Well, do _you_ know what it means?" asked he,
turning to me.

"No," I replied,--"I never heard the sound before."

"There was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked him what it
meant, and he said it had no more meaning than a bean-pole."

I told him that I held the same opinion with the schoolmaster. I had
been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. I
also heard of such names as Zoheth, Beriah, Amaziah, Bethuel, and
Shearjashub, hereabouts.

At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner,
took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and went off to bed;
then the fool followed him; and finally the old man. He proceeded to
make preparations for retiring, discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic
plainness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. We
were a rare haul for him. He could commonly get none but ministers to
talk to, though sometimes ten of them at once, and he was glad to meet
some of the laity at leisure. The evening was not long enough for him.
As I had been sick, the old lady asked if I would not go to bed,--it was
getting late for old people; but the old man, who had not yet done his
stories, said,--

"You a'n't particular, are you?"

"Oh, no," said I,--"I am in no hurry. I believe I have weathered the
Clam cape."

"They are good," said he; "I wish I had some of them now."

"They never hurt me," said the old lady.

"But then you took out the part that killed a cat," said I.

At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised
to resume in the morning. Yet, after all, one of the old ladies who came
into our room in the night to fasten the fire-board, which rattled, as
she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old women are by
nature more suspicious than old men. However, the winds howled around
the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the casements rattle well
that night. It was probably a windy night for any locality, but we could
not distinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean from that which
was due to the wind alone.

The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and
interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving the shore at
this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant,
ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea,
as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I
caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and I turned
about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far out of her
course; but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was a low bank
at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting
that I might have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the
hill, which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea, I
immediately descended again, to see if I lost the sound; but, without
regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two,
and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. The old man said that
this was what they called the "rut," a peculiar roar of the sea before
the wind changes, which, however, he could, not account for. He thought
that he could tell all about the weather from the sounds which the sea
made.

Old Josselyn, who came to New England in 1638, has it among his
weather-signs, that "the resounding of the sea from the shore, and
murmuring of the winds in the woods, without apparent wind, sheweth wind
to follow."

Being on another part of the coast one night afterwards, I heard the
roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants said it was a sign
that the wind would work round east, and we should have rainy weather.
The ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and this roar was
occasioned by its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching
the shore before the wind. Also the captain of a packet between this
country and England told me that he sometimes met with a wave on the
Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which indicated
that at a distance the wind was blowing from an opposite quarter, but
the undulation had travelled faster than it. Sailors tell of "tide-rips"
and "ground-swells," which they suppose to have been occasioned by
hurricanes and earthquakes, and to have travelled many hundred, and
sometimes even two or three thousand miles.

Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and I ran over to
the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. The old woman of
eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind,
bare-headed, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to
milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, and without noise or bustle;
and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories.

After breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of order, and
oiled it with some "hen's grease," for want of sweet oil, for he
scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or peddlers; meanwhile
he told a story about visions, which had reference to a crack in the
clock-case made by frost one night. He was curious to know to what
religious sect we belonged. He said that he had been to hear thirteen
kinds of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join
any of them,--he stuck to his Bible: there was nothing like any of them
in his Bible. While I was shaving in the next room, I heard him ask my
companion to what sect he belonged, to which he answered,--

"Oh, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood."

"What's that?" he asked,--"Sons o' Temperance?"

Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to
find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our
entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors,
and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised
from seeds that came out of the Franklin. They were cabbage, broccoli,
and parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me
in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and
cultivated. It was about half an acre, which he cultivated wholly
himself. Besides the common garden-vegetables, there were Yellow-Dock,
Lemon-Balm, Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-ground, Mouse-ear, Chickweed, Roman
Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants. As we stood there, I saw a
fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond.

"There," said I, "he has got a fish."

"Well," said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see
nothing, "he didn't dive, he just wet his claws."

And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they
often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his
talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the
ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. That is not their
practice.

Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded
under the eaves, he directed us "athwart the fields," and we took to the
beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning.

It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the Provincetown
Bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we
learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently harbor
the suspicion that we were the men.

* * * * *

CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS.

THIRD PAPER.


"I remember," says "The Spectator," "upon Mr. Baxter's death, there was
published a sheet of very good sayings, inscribed, 'The Last Words of
Mr. Baxter.' The title sold so great a number of these papers that about
a week after there came out a second sheet, inscribed, 'More Last Words
of Mr. Baxter.'" And so kindly and gladly did the public--or at least
that portion of the public that read the "Atlantic Monthly"--receive the
specimens of Charles Lamb's uncollected writings, published somewhile
since in these pages, that I am induced to print another paper on the
same pleasant and entertaining subject.

The success of that piece of "ingenious nonsense," that gem of
biographical literature, the unique and veracious "Memoir of Liston,"
over which the lovers of wit and the lovers of Charles Lamb have had
many a good laugh, was so great that Lamb was encouraged to try his hand
at another theatrical memoir, and produced a mock and mirthful
autobiography of his old friend and favorite comedian, Munden, whom he
had previously immortalized in one of the best and most admired of the
"Essays of Elia."

Those who enjoyed the biography of Liston will chuckle over the
autobiography of Munden. It was certainly a happy idea to represent
Munden as writing a sketch of his life,--not to gratify his own vanity,
or for the pleasure and entertainment of the public, but solely and
purposely to prevent the truthful and matter-of-fact biographer of
Liston from making the old player the subject of a biographical work.
The veteran actor's vehement protests against being represented as a
Presbyterian or Anabaptist, and his brief, but pungent comments on
certain passages in the Liston biography, are delightful. Methinks I see
the old man,--

"The gray-haired man of glee,"--

the great and wonderful impersonator of the "Cobbler of Preston" and
"Old Dozey,"--methinks I see this fine actor, this genial and jovial
comedian, and his son, gravely and carefully examining the great map of
Kent in search of Lupton Magna!

Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, speaking of some of Elia's
contributions to the "London Magazine," thus mentions these two
"he-children" of Lamb's:--

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