5–11 September 1853

Went to Yarmouth Sunday, 5th ; to Orleans Monday, 6th; to Nauset Light on the back side of Cape Cod. Collins, the keeper, told us he found obstinate resistance on Cape Cod to the projectof building a lighthouse on this coast, as it would injure the wrecking business. He had to go to Boston, and obtain the strong re- commendation of the Port Society. From the high hill in the rear of Higgins's, in Orleans, I had a good view of the whole Cape and the sea on both sides. The Cape looks like one of the Newfoundland Banks just emerged, a huge tract of sand half-covered with poverty grass and beach grass, and for trees, abele and locust and plantations of pitch pine. Some good oak, and in Dennis and Brewster were lately good trees for ship lumber, and they still are well wooded on the east side. But the view I speak of looked like emaciated Orkneys, — Mull, Islay, and so forth, — made of salt dust, gravel, and fish bones. They say the wind makes the roads, and, as at Nantucket, a large part of the real estate was freely moving back and forth in the air. I heard much of the coming railroad which is about to reach Yarmouth and Hyannis, and they hope will come to Provincetown. I fancied the people were only waiting for the railroad to reach them in order to evacuate the country. For the stark nakedness of the country could not be exag- gerated. But no; nothing was less true. They are all attached to what they call the soil. Mr. Collins had been as far as Indiana; but, he said, hill on hill, — he felt stifled, and "longed for the Cape, where he could see out." And whilst I was fancying that they would gladly give away land to anybody that would come and live there, and be a neighbor: no, they said, all real estate had risen, all over the Cape, and you could not buy land at less than fifty dollars per acre. And, in Provincetown, a lot on the Front Street of forty feet square would cost five or six hun- dred dollars.

" The Rhodian (the double) rose solved Malthus's problem, — since it had said that a flower which becomes double is a flower that transforms its stamens into petals, and which, consequently, becomes barren by exuberance of sap and richness."