A sandspit of marshland and low dunes, some twelve miles long and scarce two thirds of a mile wide, runs south into the Atlantic from the elbow of the Cape, its seaward rim continuing the line of the great beach to the north. East of it and south, far flung into the sea, lie the great shoals of the Cape, Bearses, the Stone Horse, the Handkerchief, Great and Little Round, Shovelful, and Pollock Rip. No tide uncovers them, but on clear, sunny days, from the watch house at Monomoy Point, their place is marked by vast, vague mottles of yellow-green lying on the water with fierce blue-black rivers of tide running high between. At the end of the dunes, on a table land of sand that might be the very end of inhabited world, stands the Coast Guard Station of Monomoy Point, watching over ship and shoal. There are strange regions in the world where a brooding melancholy dwells, regions where much that is tragic in the lives of men seems linked with a tragic something in the world. The ancient Roman towns of the Adriatic, now far from the shrunken sea, and slowly sinking into marshes that once were ports, are haunted thus, but in our own new land, this sense of ruin in a ruined world is all unknown. Yet you will find precisely this at Monomoy. The dreadful lonely quiet of the place, the haunting memory of the great wrecks of the shoals, the thin piping of sea birds in the scummy marsh, the endless cataract chatter of the shoaling seas, all these weigh with a strange solemnity upon even an unimaginative mind. Tales of wrecks upon the shoals have something of this uncanny character. I recall a story which my friend Mr. Tarvis of the Highland Station told me as I sat talking with him one quiet winter night. He had spent some time at Monomoy Point.