There was a schooner called the _Mary Rose_, and she was missing. There had been a storm on the shoals about the time she was due to go through, but nobody at the station had a sight of her, though we kept a sharp lookout on what we could see of the shoals. When you can see off in stormy weather, all the shoal water to the east and south is one big boiling smother of white. When the weather cleared, I had the morning watch, and I was up in the watch house, standing at the open window, looking over the shoals through the telescope. Pretty soon I saw something sticking up out of the water that looked like a schooner’s topmast. The captain was with me so I said to him to come and take a look, and he thought we ought to go out there and see what it was. So the Captain and I took the big dory and rowed out there, and it was this missing schooner, the _Mary Rose_. She was sitting right on the bottom on even keel, just the topmast of her showing above the waters, her hoisted sails moving a little down below there in the sea. The water was clear and you could see her deck and her dories all lashed in. They never found what had happened to her, never found even one of the bodies of the crew. Pretty soon she began to settle in the sand, her topmast broke off or went under the water, and that’s the last we saw of the _Mary Rose_. A land of utter loneliness, a land of lagoons opening and closing to the sea, of marshes sunken in the dunes and afloat with scum thin and black as watery tar, marshes in which the hulks of ancient wrecks are slowly rotting with the years, a No Man’s Land of the long and endless war of the ocean with the earth. Strange things lie in those shifting sands, wreckage washed up from the shoals; the carcasses of innumerable birds killed by the fuel oil and ravined by the skunks; great, queer Southern-looking shells. In the summer time there is a tiny settlement of Chatham fishermen at the point, but when winter comes, the dozen weather-beaten huts and shacks are deserted and the men of the station are left to their own pursuits. All along the Cape they regard Monomoy Point as “the end of creation,” and surfmen, married men in particular, do not like to be sent there. But youngsters of the gunner and roustabout type seem to get accustomed to life there, and make out very well. [Illustration: A RUM RUNNER ASHORE The Cape takes its toll from all kinds of ships that sail the sea from the old-fashioned coal cargoes to the new style of rum cargoes] LAUNCHING THE LIFE BOATS I used to discuss the method of landing the life boats with my friends at Nauset who keep a dory on the beach in which they go through the surf to the off-shore fishing grounds. Mr. Henry Daniels, surfman number one at Nauset, is known along the great beach as one of the crack boatmen of the Cape. And this is the way they do it.