Digital heart book

There are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is almost without
a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a countryman is
familiar. The thin vegetation stands half buried in sand, as in
drifting snow. The only shrub, the beach-plum, which gives the
island its name, grows but a few feet high; but this is so
abundant that parties of a hundred at once come from the
main-land and down the Merrimack, in September, pitch their
tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to
preserve. The graceful and delicate beach-pea, too, grows
abundantly amid the sand, and several strange, moss-like and
succulent plants. The island for its whole length is scalloped
into low hills, not more than twenty feet high, by the wind, and,
excepting a faint trail on the edge of the marsh, is as trackless
as Sahara. There are dreary bluffs of sand and valleys ploughed
by the wind, where you might expect to discover the bones of a
caravan. Schooners come from Boston to load with the sand for
masons' uses, and in a few hours the wind obliterates all traces
of their work.


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