At Nauset Beach we look out over the ocean, and turning, see behind us the Harbor that lies there as if bent upon offering every variety of inlet—bay, lagoon, cove, and salt river threading the marshes—that may be crowded into a small compass of miles. In its progress it all but meets the equally erratic inlets of Chatham, and also the waters of Cape Cod Bay, with the result that any breeze there is from the sea. To the south stretches the Beach, a low straight wall of sand between Harbor and ocean, moulded by the Atlantic, worried by its storms, yet somehow withstanding the impact, and linking up at the sharp apex of Chatham with the sands of Monomoy that, again, are in line with Nantucket Shoals and the Island. It needs a wary seaman to know the safe entrance to Vineyard Sound. To the north the shore rises steadily to the great bluffs at Highland Light—the Norsemen’s Gleaming Strands, a name best appreciated by the seafarer proceeding, on a fair morning, to the port of Boston, when the hours spent in running by that line of golden cliffs may be the pleasantest of his voyage. And wherever one may penetrate to the coast—unless one has the enterprise of Thoreau to tramp along shore, he must return to a town and take the next road eastward—there is always a difference in the scene. Perhaps at no point is it more lovely than at Wellfleet, where the bluffs curve gently to a promontory and the surf, touched by a stray shaft of sunlight, breaks into crystal and jade. In and out, they trend away again to the north; and the sea at our feet, forward flow and backward clutch, even on a cold day of spring sounds the whole gamut of blue, light, dark, bewilderingly mingled, out to the intense purple of our farthest reach of vision—literally, the Purple Sea. There is little break in the line of bluffs, but sometimes one of the valleys, that now begin to cut transversely across the Cape, persists to the coast; and one of the prettiest drives is to Cahoon’s Hollow by way of a typical Cape Cod wood-road, winding up hill and down, with vistas of blue ponds glinting through the trees. The road debouches on dunes, covered with a low, shrubby growth; and everywhere there has been an amazing quantity of the wild cranberry covering acre after acre with its glossy green mat of leaves. The land billows down to the water’s edge, yielding flashing glimpses of blue water long before we reach it, and rises then on either hand into deeply indented cliffs.