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