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,—­