The country, as we follow the main road inland once more, swells into rounded hills that seem under bonds to crowd as many of their company as possible into the narrow confines between sea and bay. The deep valleys among them conceal many snug homesteads built there by the First Comers; and the atmosphere is indescribably pure blending, by the winds that always blow, the bracing qualities natural to ocean and upland. It is easy to share the enthusiasm of a physician travelling this way who exclaimed: “It’s the best air in North America.” The hills now merge into high moors that narrow to the Clay Pounds where Highland Light finds a firm foundation. One overlooks both sea and bay and walks poised aloft as on a roof-tree. Thoreau is master there, and has written discursively of flora and birds and humans, and, with the wonder appropriate to an inlander, of the sea. In truth “a man may stand there and put all America behind him.” As for the name, a triangular plot of some ten acres composed of a blue clay cuts transversely through the sand; “pounds” is variously explained as a corruption of ponds or as suggested by the pounding of the surf. The land slopes up from the inner bay to the great shining bluffs that are singularly bold and picturesque, with escarpment and overhang, bastion and turret built by their architect, the sea. Below them on calm days the polished surface of the Atlantic breaks into foam on the ivory beaches. But in winter there is a different story of savage surf and an ocean that flings up its spume near two hundred feet to the starved grass of the upland. Such clamor is unbelievable in the pearly haze of summer; but even then an infrequent nor’easter may whip the Atlantic into a hungry rage as if to send it leaping over the puny barrier that divides the outer uproar from the gray dogs of the bay that are showing their teeth to the gale.