I remember the happy days when the haddock were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the surf -- when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore , and the dogfish , with his poisonous horn , had not learnt to take the hook . I can number every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street , flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth . I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach , and whose jaws , being now my gateway , will last for ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath them . Thence it is an easy digression to the halibut -- scarcely smaller than the whale -- which ran out six codlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before I could touch him with the gaff . If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation , I tell how a friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark , and the sad , true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine days missing , when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride , as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was . With such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows ! Another favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had the gift of prophecy , and whom all the village loved and pitied , though she went from door to door accusing us of sin , exhorting to repentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake . If the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks , I speak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste , and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore -- the peculiar sound of the surf on each island , beach and line of rocks along the coast . Thus do I talk , and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it pastime . I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age . It is like the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley where late in the autumn the grass is greener than in August , and intermixed with golden dandelions that had not been seen till now since the first warmth of the year . But with me the verdure and the flowers are not frost-bitten in the midst of winter . A playfulness has revisited my mind -- a sympathy with the young and gay , an unpainful interest in the business of others , a light and wandering curiosity -- arising , perhaps , from the sense that my toil on earth is ended and the brief hour till bedtime may be spent in play . Still , I have fancied that there is a depth of feeling and reflection under this superficial levity peculiar to one who has lived long and is soon to die . Show me anything that would make an infant smile , and you shall behold a gleam of mirth over the hoary ruin of my visage . I can spend a pleasant hour in the sun watching the sports of the village children on the edge of the surf . Now they chase the retreating wave far down over the wet sand ; now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet ; now it comes onward with threatening front , and roars after the laughing crew as they scamper beyond its reach . Why should not an old man be merry too , when the great sea is at play with those little children ? I delight , also , to follow in the wake of a pleasure-party of young men and girls strolling along the beach after an early supper at the Point . Here , with handkerchiefs at nose , they bend over a heap of eel-grass entangled in which is a dead skate so oddly accoutred with two legs and a long tail that they mistake him for a drowned animal .
A few steps farther the ladies scream , and the gentlemen make ready to protect them against a young XXXXX of the dogfish kind rolling with a lifelike motion in the tide that has thrown him up .
Beach Neck dandelions deep-water dogfish earthquake first in-shore shark whale