I was staying at the Race Point Station on the back shore of Provincetown. It was close upon eight o’clock at night, the lamps were lit, the living room was still, and at the end of the cleared and covered dining table a surfman off duty was reading the day’s paper and puffing a quiet pipe. It was so quiet I could vaguely hear the scratching of the pen. Suddenly this quiet world woke to a faint sound, the sound grew of an instant to a dull and hollow roaring; a whirl of unseen sand swept like sleet against the northern panes. “There you are,” called my host through his door, “the wind’s changed, and if you go on patrol to-night you’ll find some sand flying. Hear that?” A fierce, crystally patter of sand was striking at the pane; the hollow roaring had become a wintry howl. Presently I noticed that other sand storms had given the northern windows an opaque surface of ground glass. At the Race and several other stations there are sets of windows which must be renewed every single year. Then slowly, very slowly midnight came, and I dressed to go on a patrol in an old suit with socks pulled over the trouser ends, a watch cap, and my old navy pea jacket snugged round me with a poilu’s army belt. The sand takes the surface from oilskins. My fellow patrolman, Mr. Morris, was clothed in one of those excellent navy wind proof suits which are ousting oilskins from the Cape; the jumper has a hood attached to it and the whole suit has a kind of polar explorer air. After looking to see that he had his flare light signal safely tucked away, Morris threw open the station door. The night was bitter cold and overcast, and the air was full of the strangest dry hissing in the world. Along the frozen strand, and through the dead beach grass of the inland dunes, loose sand was flying, hissing as it was borne along upon the ground. The wind was thick with sand; invisible sand that blew directly into our faces, struck at our eyes, and set us to blinking, blowing, and weeping; it forced its way into the nostrils, it invaded the pouches of the ears, it gathered in the crease of one’s lips and set one to chewing out grit, one’s eyes in gritty anguish all the while. Sand and dust of sand began to gather like snow in all the hollow creases of our clothes; sand sifted down into our boots, sand found a mysterious way through our collars and down our necks, grit lodged in the eye hollows, in the eyebrows, and in the short hairs above the ears. And it came to us hissing and stinging, the cold, dry crystals falling upon the face like the myriad blows of some tiny cruel whip.