The black stork breeds from Central Europe to Korea and China, and it winters in Africa after a long round of migratory journeys. Its advent was greeted with a certain amount of mild curiosity and even some jokes in the local paper, one of which had to do with its liking for Cape Cod scallops on its arrival. What better reason for coming here! (The truth is that like other newly captured birds, it had to be force-fed.) In any case it was a rare event, joining Cape Cod with Africa, and to see it was equivalent to seeing an antelope on Route 6. With large strong wings, attenuated red legs, a long, stout pinkish bill, red around the eyes, it waited in captivity with what seemed to be an air of great sadness, transplanted as it was, taken in to a gray, cold land without any sound but engines, human voices, and the wind, without any greenery but the thin-needled pines; and it roosted silently, twitching occasionally in its inactive unused state, an unwilling, unwitting Marco Polo in New England. This is a narrow place, restricted by nature and by men, but foreign lives still fly to it like sparks in the air, and the sea beyond it takes things on their way with more room than analogy is yet aware of. What the sea sends in, like a dead skate, a starfish, horse mussel, or finger sponge, seems perfectly familiar as fish, marine, background animals, but they are also genuine primitives, remote not only from human physiology and complete understanding but from that part of the earth’s surface that we inhabit. In fact many of the hints of marine life that are either brought up along the beach, or that appear in offshore waters, like a whale or a dolphin, have a theatricality, an off-stage hint of a wealth of other acts, tricks, and forms still to be seen. The simple, primal watery element has embodiments of use which are comprehensible and have been studied for a long time, but these are endowed with physical natures and capabilities that might make an air-breathing, earth-bound human quite envious.