of a week of calms and light winds, was low even for that time of
year--early June.

To the north stretched the shores of the back of the Cape. High clay
bluffs, rain-washed and wrinkled, sloping sharply to the white sand
of the beach a hundred feet below. Only one building, except
those connected with the lighthouses, near at hand, this a small,
gray-shingled bungalow about two hundred yards away, separated from the
lights by the narrow stream called Clam Creek--Seth always spoke of it
as the "Crick"--which, turning in behind the long surf-beaten sandspit
known, for some forgotten reason, as "Black Man's Point," continued to
the salt-water pond which was named "The Cove." A path led down from the
lighthouses to a bend in the "Crick," and there, on a small wharf, was a
shanty where Seth kept his spare lobster and eel-pots, dory sails, nets,
and the like. The dory itself, with the oars in her, was moored in the
cove.

A mile off, to the south, the line of bluffs was broken by another
inlet, the entrance to Pounddug Slough. This poetically named channel
twisted and wound tortuously inland through salt marshes and between
mudbanks, widening at last to become Eastboro Back Harbor, a good-sized
body of water, with the village of Eastboro at its upper end. In the
old days, when Eastboro amounted to something as a fishing port, the
mackerel fleet unloaded its catch at the wharves in the Back Harbor.
Then Pounddug Slough was kept thoroughly dredged and buoyed. Now it was
weed-grown and neglected. Only an occasional lobsterman's dory traversed
its winding ways, which the storms and tides of each succeeding winter
rendered more difficult to navigate. The abandoned fish houses along its
shores were falling to pieces, and at intervals the stranded hulk of
a fishing sloop or a little schooner, rotting in the sun, was a dismal