A mizzling and rainy day with thick driving fog; a drizzling rain, or “drisk,” as one called it. I struck across into the stage-road, a quarter of a mile east, and followed that a mile or more into an extensive bare plain tract called Silver Springs, in the southwest part of Wellfleet . . .

  Stopped to drv me about ll A.M. at a house near John Newcomb’s, who they told me died last winter, ninety-five years old (or would have been now had he lived?). I had shortly before picked up a Mother-Carey’s-chicken, which was just washed up dead on the beach. This I carried tied to the tip of my umbrella, dangling outside. When the inhabitants saw me come up from the beach this stormy day, with this emblem dangling from my umbrella, and saw me set it up in a corner carefully to be out of the way of cats, they may have taken me for a crazy man . . .