"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.
* * * * *