There, at one point, the tide marches out a long mile to the Great Bar and back again, by appointed channels, unhurrying, punctual to the minute, to keep its tryst with the shore. Sailors, unless they have a care to the time, are likely to be “hung up” on the Bar; but for one ashore who looks out to the white line of breaking foam, every moment of the ebb and turn has its special beauty. In bright days the shoaling waters show a lovely interlacement of greens and blue; but when the sky is shrouded in gray, fold upon fold, and the sun, invisible, steps softly westward, their surface is like burnished metal, although a painter’s eye would discern there a pastel of mauves and pink and blue and a whole chromatic scale of green. White sandflats, disclosed by the ebb, are carved in whorls like a shell by the hand of the tide. Inshore plumy grasses fringe them; here and there infinitesimal forms of life stain them amethyst or green. But the wide sweep of them responds to some subtile quality in the day, and they are plains of pearl where cloudy shadows drift, or, in certain golden hours, they burn with color like some jewelled marquetry of the East. A flaming sunset walks them with feet of blood. And day after day they, or the waters above them, surprise us with some new sweet diversity. A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun—water and sky and the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea—the bay, seeming all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among the hills. Above the beaches, now and again, stand groves of pines, homely thurifers that incense the breeze as it passes. And where the line of shore dips to a lowland, the salt marshes, with their exquisite adjustment to the season, are a treasury of beauty—rich greens flushing and dying to the bronze, studded with haycocks like the bosses of an ancient shield, that challenges encroaching autumn tides.