Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more thantwo-thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of another world, I made a visit to Cape Cod in October, 1849, another the succeedingJune, and another to Truro in July, 1855; the first and last time with a single companion, the secondtime alone. I have spent, in all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side also, excepting four or five miles, andcrossed the Cape half a dozen times on my way; but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got butlittle salted. My readers must expect only so much saltness as the land breeze acquires from blowingover an arm of the sea, or is tasted on the windows and the bark of trees twenty miles inland, afterSeptember gales. I have been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within ten miles ofConcord, but latterly I have extended my excursions to the seashore.I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape Cod, as well as my neighbor on "HumanCulture." It is but another name for the same thing, and hardly a sandier phase of it. As for my title, I suppose that the word Cape is from the French cap; which is from the Latin caput, a head; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, -that being the part by which we take hold of a thing: -TakeTime by the forelock. It is also the safest part to take a serpent by. And as for Cod, that was deriveddirectly from that "great store of codfish" which Captain Bartholomew Gosnold caught there in1602; which fish appears to have been so called from the Saxon word codde, "a case in which seedsare lodged," either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains; whence also, perhaps, codling (pomum coctile?) and coddle, -to cook green like peas. (V. Dic.)Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts: the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; theelbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown, -behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feetplanted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her Bay, -boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, -ready to thrustforward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast a