and pulled swiftly across the bar, over which the tide had risen a few inches, and, bidding good-morning to my hospitable entertainers, set off for Eastern Point.  There was considerable swell, though not much wind.  The shore being familiar to me, I was rowing along leisurely, recognizing one well-known cliff after another, as they came in sight, and was between Kettle Island and the main, when a slight dampness in the air caused me to turn my face to the eastward, and I saw coming in from the sea, preceded by an advance guard of feathery mist, a dense bank of fog.  It swept in, blotting out sea, shore, everything but the view a few feet around the boat.  Fortunately knowing the place, and guided by the sound of the surf, I soon neared the wet, brown rocks at the inner edge of Kettle Island.  Backing up into a little cove between two huge sea-weedy boulders I waited, hoping that a turn in the wind might drive the mist seaward and allow me to keep on.  There I sat a full hour, watching the star-fish, and the crabs scrambling about among the loose strands of the olive-green and deep purple rock-weed, which looked almost black in the shadow, while here and there, as it waved to and fro with the sea, disclosing patches of yellow sand.  Very beautiful was this natural aquarium; but time was flying, and “The Shoals” were more than thirty miles distant.  The mist began to drive in long rifts, and a gleam of sunshine came out, but only for a moment.  I took advantage of it at once, and pushed out from port.

The opposite shore of the cove, in the mouth of which the island lies, was dimly discernible, and the dense foliage of the willows surrounding the fishermen’s houses loomed up in the distance, while at the extreme end of the Point the sea broke heavily on the long protruding reef which slanted eastward.  I made rapidly for the Point, and reached the outside line of rollers just in time; for the fog, which had been drifting backwards and forwards and torn in long rents, now closed over again, shutting down darker than ever.  It was with the utmost difficulty that I could make out the faint gray line of cliff and surf.  On the whole, however, it appeared best to keep on and feel my way along the coast, navigating rather by sound than by sight.  The shore grows higher as you go northward towards Gloucester harbor, and is, if possible, more rugged and broken than to the south.  The chief danger was from sunken rocks, which every wave submerged three or four feet, and which in the hollow of the sea were wholly above water.  I came upon one very suddenly, as the wave was swelling above it, and the rock-weed afloat on its sunken head looked, for the instant, like the hair of a drowning person.  My boat went directly over it, and the next moment its black crest rose in the trough of the wave.  One such chance of wreck was enough, and so I kept farther out, losing sight almost entirely of the cliffs.  The sun, meanwhile, was pouring down an intense heat, making the fog luminous, but