And then there was his dog which had to be chained up because it got so wildly excited chasing rabbits through the woods that it was constantly lost, having once been picked up nearly ten miles away; and the coon that climbed a tree after a hen; and his little granddaughter wanting to shine a flashlight through the window one night and take a picture of a coon she saw outdoors, because it was “such a pretty-looking animal.” There also come to mind the fishing boats all-over white with screaming gulls, that he once spoke about with real excitement, and, of course, the yearly work on his cranberry bogs ... he and his tart and lively wife used to pick them together; and the shifting price of cranberries, and his wood lots, and who was after him to buy some of his land. “Yes yes” he would say, in the Cape Cod fashion, and always, when a customer was leaving the shop: “Come again.” His wife Emily died two years before him. Some time before that I stopped to talk with him when he was scything the family plot in Red Top Cemetery, which lies at the junction of two country roads, on a little hill or high knoll up in the sky and the ocean winds. He told me two women had come up one day while he was there and said: “What a nice place!” He and his wife are buried there, in a place which has no more permanence than any other, but for them and by them had the simple power of acquaintance. [Illustration] _Night in the Afternoon_ If I have left Nathan Black in the nineteenth century (although when I last saw him he was deeply involved with a television set) or at least in a tradition which no longer appears to sustain us, it is not to emphasize that all continuity is lost. He has left us transients to make what we can of the Cape Cod weather, without assistance, but the examples it still offers are both patient and surprising. Storms and stars never fail us. The theme this month is a growing cold, but whether we are to have rain or snow, hard frosts, or comparative mildness is not known. If you listen to what people say about the weather you go from apprehension to apprehension. It is as though we were already working to keep our lives open until spring. I suspect that by March we get tired of comment. In any case it represents a communication with the forces around us, and I am not one to disparage such banalities.