A great bank, half a mile out, nigh the mouth of the bay, breaks the force of the main ocean coming in from the offing.

Winter and summer, when the tide flows over the quicksand, the sea seems to leave the waves behind it on the bank, and rolls its waters in smoothly with a heave, and covers the sand in silence.

A lonesome and a horrid retreat, I can tell you! No boat ever ventures into this bay.

No children from our fishing-village, called Cobb's Hole, ever come here to play.

The very birds of the air, as it seems to me, give the Shivering Sand a wide berth.