These blowing sand-dunes have, however, a strange beauty of their own, and the color effects in autumn, given by the low and ragged brush, are of the warmest. “It was like the richest rug imaginable,” wrote Thoreau, “spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and Aspen,--each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug.” The sand has dealt most unkindly of all with Truro, choking up her harbor, from which a fine fleet of mackerel vessels used to sail. No longer is her rollicking fishing-song, apparently an inheritance from Old England, lifted on the morning breeze: “Up jumped the mackerel, With his striped back-- Says he, reef in the mains’l, and haul on the tack, For it’s windy weather, It’s stormy weather, And when the wind blows pipe all hands together-- For, upon my word, it’s windy weather. “Up jumped the cod, With his chuckle head-- And jumped into the main chains to heave at the lead,-- For it’s windy weather,” etc.