"necks" and sea-like expansions, for a hundred miles to Orient point.
On the ocean side the great south bay dotted with countless hummocks,
mostly small, some quite large, occasionally long bars of sand out two
hundred rods to a mile-and-a-half from the shore. While now and then,
as at Rockaway and far east along the Hamptons, the beach makes right
on the island, the sea dashing up without intervention. Several
light-houses on the shores east; a long history of wrecks tragedies,
some even of late years. As a youngster, I was in the atmosphere and
traditions of many of these wrecks--of one or two almost an observer.
Off Hempstead beach for example, was the loss of the ship "Mexico" in
1840, (alluded to in "the Sleepers" in L. of G.) And at Hampton,
some years later, the destruction of the brig "Elizabeth," a fearful
affair, in one of the worst winter gales, where Margaret Fuller went
down, with her husband and child.

Inside the outer bars or beach this south bay is everywhere
comparatively shallow; of cold winters all thick ice on the surface.
As a boy I often went forth with a chum or two, on those frozen
fields, with hand-sled, axe and eel-spear, after messes of eels. We
would cut holes in the ice, sometimes striking quite an eel-bonanza,
and filling our baskets with great, fat, sweet, white-meated fellows.
The scenes, the ice, drawing the hand-sled, cutting holes, spearing
the eels, &c., were of course just such fun as is dearest to boyhood.
The shores of this bay, winter and summer, and my doings there in
early life, are woven all through L. of G. One sport I was very fond
of was to go on a bay-party in summer to gather sea-gull's eggs. (The
gulls lay two or three eggs, more than half the size of hen's eggs,
right on the sand, and leave the sun's heat to hatch them.)

The eastern end of Long Island, the Peconic bay region, I knew quite