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Among the now rare gravestones of the seventeenth century on Burial Hill, we look in vain for the most familiar names: Elder Brewster died in 1644, lamented by all the colony; Edward Winslow died at sea in 1655, and in the two years following this sad loss Myles Standish and Governor Bradford ended their labors. So closed the lives of these leaders of men. Descendants, brave, wise and strong like themselves, continued worthily the work they had nobly begun.

From 1630, Plymouth held friendly intercourse with the Boston Bay Colony. The terrors of the war with Philip, treacherous son of the friendly Massasoit, had united her with the neighboring colonies against a common foe, and at length, after seventy-one years of nearly independent existence, we find her, in 1692, absorbed, with some regret, into the royal province of Massachusetts, but still ready to take her part in public affairs.

Beneath his symbolic scallop-shell we read the name of Elder Faunce, who knew the Pilgrims, and, living for ninety-nine years, formed an important link between two centuries. The stone consecrated to the memory of the Rev. Chandler Robbins, who for nearly twoscore years toward the close of the last century gave his faithful services to the first parish, reminds us that at one time the town fathers found it advisable to request him "not to have more horses grazing on Burial Hill than shall be really necessary!"

Here, in old times, could be had a grand view of the shipping, come from the West Indies and all parts of the world; from here the news of many fatal shipwrecks had been spread through the town, to rouse willing help for suffering sailors; here, too, no doubt, men's souls were often tempted to incur the fine of twenty shillings, the cost of "telling a lie about seeing a whale," in those strict days when a plain lie, if "pernicious," was taxed at half that price!

Old Father Time with his scythe and hour-glass--symbols of his power--rules here over seven generations; but lingering while the setting sun illumines the harbor and the surrounding hills with the same radiance that rejoiced the first comers, while Manomet glows with a deeper purple, and the twin lights of the Gurnet shine out, we may still feel in very deed that

"The Pilgrim spirit has not fled."

Turning from the story of Plymouth, as written on the lichen-covered headstones on Burial Hill, let us wend our way under the shady elms of Court Street to Pilgrim Hall, built in 1824 by the Pilgrim Society, instituted four years earlier. Here we may trace, in the many treasured reminders of their daily lives, the annals of those brave souls in whom

" ...persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition."

On broad canvases are portrayed the tearful embarkation from Delfthaven, the landing on this cheerless, frozen shore. Here are hung charming pencil sketches of Scrooby and Austerfield, and many interesting portraits: Dr. Thatcher, the venerable secretary of the Pilgrim Society, and author of a charming history of Plymouth; the Rev. James Kendall, for nearly threescore years the beloved minister of the First Church; Gov. Edward Winslow and his son Josiah; Gen. John Winslow, who by royal command in 1755 helped to drive from their homes the French Acadians; Deacon Ephraim Spooner, whose "lining out" of the old hymns formed an impressive part of "Anniversary Day"; Daniel Webster, who lived in Marshfield, and whose glowing oration of 1820, in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, was epoch-making in Plymouth annals.

A large copy of the seal of the colony, in handsomely carved oak, reminds us that the original seal was stolen in the days of Andros. Its appropriate motto, "Patrum pietate ortum, filiorum virtute servandum," may be found

in which Peregrine White, that most youthful of voyagers, was rocked to sleep. The large hole worn in the foot of the cradle suggests pleasantly that the rosy toes of the sturdy baby colonists made early for freedom! Perhaps the tiny leathern ankle-ties, hardly four inches in length, which belonged to Josiah Winslow--this was long before they thought of making him governor--had a hand, or rather a foot, in that bombardment! Near the shoes is a dainty salt-cellar of blue and white enamel, delicately painted with pink and yellow roses, suggestive of fine linen and pleasant hospitality. Here too are

"The wheels where they spun In the pleasant light of the sun,"

As we walk through the lively main street of the town, we must stop to admire the fine gambrel roof of the old house where lived James Warren, that active patriot, who became president of the Provincial Congress, and whose wife, Mercy Otis Warren, wrote the "rousing word" which kindled many a heart in Revolutionary days. The line of fine lindens just beyond, as they rustle in the cool sea-breeze, could whisper many a charming tale of lovely dames and stately men, of scarlet cloaks and powdered wigs they have watched pass by under their shading branches, of treasures of old china and old silver, of blue tiles and claw-footed furniture, of Copley portraits now packed off to the great city, and of many changes come about since they came here as young trees from Nova Scotia, in a raisin-box.

Overlooking the blue water stands the old Winslow house, the solid frame of which came from England in 1754. Under its spreading lindens, through the fine colonial doorway so beautifully carved, many distinguished guests have passed, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson was married to Lydia Jackson, who was born in the picturesque house just beyond, almost hidden in trees and vines.

A drive toward the south will take us by some of the oldest houses. From the one with a dyke in front, Adoniram Judson, the famous Baptist missionary, took his departure for Burmah. His devoted sister then vowed that no one should cross the threshold until his return, and the door-step was taken away. Grass grew over the pathway, and the front door remained closed, for he died at sea, in 1850.

Past the blue Eel River, flowing gently through shining green meadows to the sea, we may drive along quiet roads in Plymouth Woods, under sweet pines and sturdy oaks, by the shore of many a calm pond, sparkling in its setting of white beach sand. We cross old Indian trails, perhaps, and skirt acre after acre of level cranberry-bogs, pink and white, like a sheet of delicate sprig-muslin, when in bloom, and bright with the crimson fruit in early autumn. In these woods in their season bloom sweet mayflowers, the rare rhodora, the sabbatia, sundew and corema, and there many another treasure may be found by those who know how to seek!

But the manifold charms of Plymouth and Plymouth Woods must be seen and felt on the soil whence they sprung! So in the hope that the "Courteous Reader" to whom they are still unfamiliar may care to verify this truthful statement, we leave in brief and imperfect outline this story of the Old Colony, whither "they wente weeping and carried precious seeds; but they shall returne with joye and bring their sheaves."

CAPE COD TOWNS

FROM PROVINCETOWN TO FALMOUTH

BY KATHARINE LEE BATES

"Cape Cod," wrote Thoreau, "is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts; the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown--behind which the State stands on her guard."

These stout-hearted Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to set foot on Cape Cod. Legends of the Vikings which drift about the low white dunes are as uncertain as the shifting sands themselves, and the French and Florentine navigators who sailed along the North American coast in the first half of the sixteenth century may have done no more than sight this sickle of land between sea and bay, but there are numerous records of

shipboard, carried them off, and sold them into slavery at Malaga, Spain, for twenty pounds a man. As a consequence of this crime, the Indians grew suspicious and revengeful, but nevertheless an irregular trade was maintained with them by passing vessels, until the pestilence that raged among the red men of the region from 1616 to 1619 interrupted communication.

Once more, on the 16th of December, the shallop started forth to find a home for the Pilgrims. Ten colonists, including Carver, Bradford and Standish, together with a few men of the ship's crew, volunteered for this service. It was so cold that the sleety spray glazed doublet and jerkin "and made them many times like coats of iron." The voyagers landed within the present limits of Eastham or Orleans, where, hard by the shore, a camp was roughly barricaded. One day passed safely in exploration, but at dawn of the second, when, "after prayer," the English sat about their camp-fire at breakfast, "a great and strange cry" cut the mist, and on the instant Indian arrows, headed with deer-horn and eagles' claws, whizzed about their heads. But little Captain Standish was not to be caught napping. "Having a snaphance ready," he fired in direction of the war-whoop. His comrades supported him manfully, their friends in the shallop, themselves beset, shouted encouragement, and the savages, gliding back among the trees, melted into "the dark of the morning." After this taste of Cape Cod courtesy, the Pilgrim Fathers can hardly be blamed for taking to their shallop again and plunging on, in a stiff gale, through the toppling waves, until, with broken rudder and mast split in three, they reached a refuge in the harbor of Plymouth.

Since the Revolution, Provincetown has steadily progressed in numbers and prosperity, until to-day, with over four thousand five hundred inhabitants, it is the banner town of the Cape. During this period of development, the Province Lands, several thousand acres in extent, naturally became a subject of dispute. Old residents had fallen into a way of buying and selling the sites on which they had built homes and stores, as if the land were theirs in legal ownership. Five years ago, however, the General Court virtually limited State ownership to the waste tracts in the north and west of the township, leaving the squatters in possession of the harbor-front. "The released portion of the said lands," stated the Harbor and Land Commissioners in their report of 1893, "is about 955 acres and includes the whole inhabited part of the town of Provincetown."

The present Provincetown is well worth a journey. From High Pole Hill, a bluff seventy feet high in the rear of the populated district, one gazes far out over blue waters, crossed with cloud-shadows and flecked with fishing-craft. Old sea-captains gather here with spy-glasses to make out the shipping; bronzed sailor-boys lie in the sun and troll snatches of song; young mothers of dark complexion and gay-colored dress croon lullabies, known in Lisbon and Fayal, over sick babies brought to the hilltop for the breezy air; the very parrot that a black-eyed urchin guards in a group of admiring playmates talks "Portugee." Leaning over the railing, one looks down the bushy slope of the bluff to the curious huddle of houses at its base. Out from the horseshoe bend of shore, run thin tongues of wharf and jetty. Front Street follows the water-line, a seaport variety of outfitting stores and shops, mingled with hotels, fish-flakes, shipyards and the like, backing on the beach, with the dwelling-houses opposite facing the harbor-view. Back Street copies the curve of Front, and the two are joined by queer, irregular little crossways, that take the abashed wayfarer close under people's windows and along the very borders of their gardens and poultry-yards. Although nearly all of the buildings stand on one or the other of these main streets, there are bunches and knots of houses in sheltered places, looking as if the blast had blown them into accidental nooks. In general these houses are built close and low, tucked in under one another's elbows, but here and there an independent cottage thrusts its sharp-roofed defiance into the very face of the weather.

Up and down the sandy knolls behind the streets straggle populous graveyards, where one may read the fortunes of Provincetown more impressively, if less precisely, than in the census reports. Where the goodly old Nathaniels and Shubaels and Abrahams and Jerushas rest, a certain decorum of green sodding and white headstone is maintained, despite the irreligious riot of the winds. The Catholic burial-ground, too, is not uncared for in its Irish portion. Marble and granite monuments implore "Lord have mercy on the soul" of some Burke or Ryan or McCarty, but the Portuguese, wanderers from the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores, sleep the sleep of strangers, with no touch of tenderness or beauty about their dreary lodging. Only here and there a little Jacinto or Manuel or Antone has his short mound set about with fragments of clam-shell, as if in children's play. Some lots are enclosed, the black posts with rounded tops looking like monastic sentries, and a few headboards, with the painted name already rain-washed out of recognition, lean away from the wind. In the centre of this gaunt graveyard, where the roaring Atlantic storms tear up even the coarse tufts of beach-grass, a great gray cross of wood, set in a hill of sand, spreads weather-beaten arms. The guardianship of the Church and the fellowship of the sea these Portuguese fisherfolk brought with them, and as yet America has given them nothing dearer.

The Portuguese constitute a large proportion of the foreign element in Barnstable County, where nearly nine tenths of the people are of English descent. The protruding tip of Cape Cod easily catches such ocean drift as these Western Islanders, and they have made their way as far up the Cape as Falmouth, where they watch their chance to buy old homesteads at low rates. They are natural farmers and even in Harwich and Truro divide their labors between sea and land. But it is in Provincetown that these swart-faced strangers most do congregate, gardening wherever a garden is possible, tending the fish-weirs, working, when herring are plenty, in the canning factories, and almost monopolizing the fresh fishing industry. Even those who are most thrifty, building homes and buying vessels, wear the look of aliens, and some, when their more active years are over, gather up their savings and return to the Azores; but the raven-haired girls are beginning to listen to Yankee wooers, and the next century may see the process of amalgamation well under way. Already these new Pilgrims have tasted so much of the air of freedom as to wax a little restive under the authority of their fiery, devoted young priest, who upbraids them with his last expletive for their shortcomings as energetically as he aids them with his last dollar in their distress.

In the general aspect of the port, it is as true to-day as when, in 1808, the townspeople petitioned for a suspension of the embargo, that their interest is "almost totally in fish and vessels." A substantial citizen keeps his boat as naturally as an inlander would keep his carriage. Any loiterer on the street can lend a hand with sweep-seine or jibstay, but the harnessing of a horse is a mystery known to few. In 1819, there was but one horse owned in Provincetown, and that "an old, white one with one eye." In point of fact, however, the fortunes of Provincetown seem to demand, at present, some further support than the fisheries. It is believed that, by dint of capital, labor and irrigation, more could be gained from the soil, and that the advantages of the place as a summer resort might be developed. The whaling business has greatly declined

The foreign element in Provincetown is not all Portuguese. There is a sprinkling of many nationalities, especially Irish, and, more numerous yet, English and Scotch from the British provinces, while sailor-feet from all over the globe tread the long plank-walk of Front Street. This famous walk was built, after much wrangling, from the town's share of the Surplus Revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson, and the story goes that the more stiff-necked opponents of this extravagance refused their lifetimes long to step upon the planks, and plodded indignantly through the sandy middle of the road. Upon this chief thoroughfare stand several churches, looking seaward. Sailors in these waters used to steer by the meeting-house steeples, which are frequent all along the Cape. Some of those early churches now struggle on with meagre congregations, and a few are abandoned, the wind whistling through the empty belfries. Provincetown has a record of ancient strife between the Orthodox and the Methodists. The established sect resented the intrusion of the new doctrine to such a degree that they made a bonfire of the timber designed for the Methodist building. The heretics effectively retaliated by securing the key to the Orthodox meeting-house, locking out the astonished owners, and taking permanent possession, triumphantly singing Methodist hymns to the Orthodox bass-viol. It was thirty-two years before the discomfited Orthodox rallied sufficiently to build themselves another church.

Journeying from Provincetown, "perched out on a crest of alluvial sand," up the wrist of the Cape, one sees the land a-making. At first the loose sand drifts like snow. Then the coarse marsh-grasses begin to bind and hold it, low bushes mat their roots about it, and planted tracts of pitch-pine give the shifting waste a real stability. The Pilgrims found, they said,--but perhaps there was a Canaan dazzle in their eyes,--their landing-place well wooded and the soil "a spit's depth, excellent black earth." But now all sods and garden-ground must be brought from a distance, and a mulberry or a sycamore, even the most stunted apple-tree that squats and cowers from the wind, is a proud possession. When President Dwight of Yale rode through Truro into Provincetown a century ago, he was amazed at the sterility and bleak desolation of the landscape, half hidden as it was by "the tempestuous tossing of the clouds of sand." He was told that the inhabitants were required by law to plant every April bunches of beach-grass to keep the sand from blowing. The national government, stirred by the danger to the harbor, afterwards took the matter in hand. Between 1826 and 1838, twenty-eight thousand dollars were expended in an attempt to strengthen the harbor shores by beach-grass. Of late Massachusetts has become aroused to the desolate condition of her Province Lands, and is making a determined effort to redeem them by the planting of trees and by other restorative measures. These blowing sand-dunes have, however, a strange beauty of their own, and the color effects in autumn, given by the low and ragged brush, are of the warmest.

"It was like the richest rug imaginable," wrote Thoreau, "spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and Aspen,--each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug."

The sand has dealt most unkindly of all with Truro, choking up her harbor, from which a fine fleet of mackerel vessels used to sail. No longer is her rollicking fishing-song, apparently an inheritance from Old England, lifted on the morning breeze:

"Up jumped the mackerel, With his striped back-- Says he, reef in the mains'l, and haul on the tack, For it's windy weather, It's stormy weather, And when the wind blows pipe all hands together-- For, upon my word, it's windy weather. "Up jumped the cod, With his chuckle head-- And jumped into the main chains to heave at the lead,-- For it's windy weather," etc.

This town, the Indian Pamet, was formally settled in 1709 by a few English purchasers from Eastham, having been occupied earlier only by irresponsible fishermen and traders. The new planters took hold with energy, waging war against blackbirds and crows, wolves and foxes, for the protection of their little wealth in corn and cattle, while none the less they dug clams, fished by line and net and watched from their lookouts for offshore whales. The Cape plumes itself not a little upon its early proficiency in whaling. In 1690, one Ichabod Paddock, whose name might so easily have been Haddock, went from Yarmouth to Nantucket "to instruct the people in the art of killing whales in boats from the shore." And when the sea-monster, thus maltreated, withdrew from its New England haunts, the daring whalemen built ships and followed, cruising the Atlantic and Pacific, even the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. But the Revolution put a check on all our maritime enterprises. The Truro fishermen, like the rest, laid by their harpoons, and melted up their mackerel leads for bullets. From one village of twenty-three houses, twenty-eight men gave up their lives for liberty. In religion, too, Truro had the courage of her convictions, building the first Methodist meeting-house on the Cape, the second in New England. The cardinal temptation of Cape Cod is Sunday fishing, and Truro righteousness was never put more sharply to the pinch than in 1834, when a prodigious school of blackfish appeared off Great Hollow one autumnal Sabbath morning. A number of Truro fishermen, from the Grand Banks and elsewhere, were on their way home in boats from Provincetown, when the shining shoulders of hundreds of the great fish were seen moving through the waves. With fortunes in full view, a goodly number of these men shifted into boats which rowed soberly for their destination, while the rest, with eager outcry, rounded up the school, and drove the frightened creatures, with shouts and blows from the oars, like sheep upon the beach. Church-members who took part in the wild chase were brought to trial, but a lurking sympathy in the hearts of their judges saved them from actual expulsion.

This befell within the period of Truro's highest prosperity. From 1830 to 1855 the wharves were crowded with sloops and schooners, a shipyard was kept busy, and salt was made all along the shore. At the middle of the century, the town had over two thousand inhabitants, but the number has now fallen off by some three fifths. The "turtle-like sheds of the salt-works," which Thoreau noted, have been long since broken up and sold for lumber. There is weir-fishing still, supplying fresh fish for market and bait for the fishing-fleets of Provincetown and Gloucester. Rods of the black netting may be seen spread over the poverty-grass to dry.

Although the sand of Cape Cod is in some places three hundred feet deep, there is believed to be a backbone of diluvian rock. There is a clay vein, too, which slants across the Cape and crops out at Truro in the so-called Clay Pounds, now crowned by Highland Light, shining two hundred feet above the ocean. This hill of clay thus renders a sovereign service to that dangerous stretch of navigation. It must be borne in mind that Cape Cod runs out straight into the Atlantic for twoscore miles, by the south measurement, and then,

abruptly turning, juts up another forty to the north. The shifty sand-bars of the Back Side have caught, twisted and broken the hulls of innumerable craft. One gale of wind wrecked eighteen vessels between Race Point, at the extremity of the Cape, and Highland Light. The average width of our crooked peninsula is six miles, but at Truro it narrows to half that distance. Across this strip the storms whirl the flinty sand, until the humblest cottage may boast of ground-glass window-panes. The coast outline is ever changing and the restless dunes show the fantastic carvings of the wind. The houses cuddle down into the wavy hollows, with driftwood stacked at their back doors for fuel, and with worn-out fishnets stretched about the chicken-yards. Here and there a pine-tree abandons all attempt at keeping up appearances and lies flat before the blast. The ploughed fields are as white with sand as so many squares of beach, and the sea-tang is strong in the air. Accustomed, before their harbor failed them, to depend chiefly upon the sea for subsistence, the people of Truro now find it no easy matter to wrest a living from what they have of land. Everything is turned to account, from turnips to

mayflowers. Along those sand-pits of roads, bordered with thick beds of pink-belled bear-berries, or where the dwarfish pines, their wizened branches hung with gray tags of moss, yellow the knolls, are gathered large quantities of sweetest, pinkest arbutus for the Boston market.

The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch. They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings, a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith, Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one hundred and ten, rounding life's circle so completely that at the end, as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.

Thoreau was amused over a provision made by the town of Eastham in 1662, that "a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of the ministry," and drew a fancy-picture of the old parsons sitting on the sand-hills in the storms, anxiously watching for their salaries to be rolled ashore over the bars of the Back Side. One of these worthies, Rev. Samuel Treat, whose oratory outroared the stormy surf, shares with Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, the memory of a true pastoral care for the Cape Indians. He was, in return, so well beloved, that, on his death, his wild converts dug a long passage through the remarkably deep snowfall of the time, and bore him on their shoulders down this white archway to his grave. The Revolutionary War was a heavy drain on the resources of the staunch little town, but, with the restoration of peace, whaling and all kinds of deep-sea fishing were resumed, and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established, and presently Eastham was able to afford such luxuries as a pulpit cushion and a singing-school.

Orleans, set off in 1797 from the southerly portion of Eastham, has an old-fashioned quaintness that is better than business prosperity. Sand has partially closed the harbors, and the population has been dwindling for the past half-century, but the ocean still serves old neighbors as it can with quahaugs and the seaweed, now collected for paper-making. The distinction of being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from Brest is in keeping with the name Orleans--a unique instance of a foreign title among these old Cape towns. The early settlers put by the melodious Indian words, Succanessett, Mattacheeset, and the rest, and substituted the dear home names from Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Kent. The christening of Brewster, Bourne and Dennis honored severally the Pilgrim elder, the Sandwich friend of the Indians and a Yarmouth pastor; but these are of comparatively recent date. As Wellfleet and Orleans have been cut, on north and south, out of the original Eastham, so were Harwich, Chatham, Dennis, Brewster, once "within the liberties of Yarmouth."

The history of Yarmouth, too, is so closely allied to the histories of Barnstable and of Sandwich, with her daughter Bourne, that the story of all these may be told as one.

Many of the summer guests prefer the north side of the Cape, where fogs are less frequent, or where, in ancient Indian parlance, old Maushope smokes his pipe less often. Such find in Brewster and Dennis no less delightful colonies of ancient ship-masters, living easily off their sea-hoards. In 1837 that little town of Dennis claimed no fewer than one hundred and fifty skippers sailing from various American ports, and in 1850 it was said that more sea-captains went on foreign voyages from Brewster than from any other place in the United States. Often their wives sailed with them and had thereafter something wider than village gossip to bring to the quilting-and the sewing-circle. It was a great day for the children in the village when a sea-captain came home. From door to door went his frank sailor-gifts, jars of Chinese sweetmeats, shimmering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, cocoanuts, parrots, fans of gay feather, boxes of spicy wood, glowing corals, and such great, whispering shells as Cape Cod beaches never knew. It was a hospitable and merry time, given to savory suppers, picnic clambakes, and all manner of neighborly good-cheer. Even the common dread made for a closer sympathy. Any woman, going softly to her neighbor to break the news of the husband lost in Arctic ice, might in some dark hour drop her head upon that neighbor's shoulder in hearing of a son drowned off the Banks or slain by South Sea Islanders.

sand cuts their faces to bleeding and still the furious surf makes playthings of their lifeboats, so that manhood has no less heroic opportunity than in the earlier days. The crew at one of these stations, after an exposure of twelve hours on the wintry beach, failed in every effort to launch the surf-boat and had to see the rescue they should have made effected by a crew of fishermen volunteers. The keeper brooded over his disgrace and the following winter wiped out what is known upon the Cape as the "goading slur" by a

desperate launching in a surf that beat the life from his body.

Ever since the day of the Pilgrims, who made the suggestion, and of George Washington, who furthered the project, there has been talk of a Cape Cod canal to expedite traffic and avert disaster. A channel between Eastham and Orleans was once forced by the sea, and various routes through Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich have been surveyed, and charters granted, but ships still round Race Point. The railroad, however, which was built by slow stages down the Cape and reached Provincetown only a quarter of a century since, has facilitated travel, doing away both with the red-and-yellow mail-coach, which used, a hundred years ago, to clatter through to Boston in two glorious days, and with the packet service of jolly memory. Yarmouth and Barnstable were sharp rivals in these packet trips, Barnstable putting her victories into verse:

Barnstable has pursued from the outset a course of modest prosperity. She does not ask too much of fortune. If her census-roll has gained only five in the last decade, that is better than losing, as most of the Cape towns have done, and, even so, her numbers rank next to Provincetown. How humble were the beginnings of this sedate and gracious county seat may be learned from the letter of an early citizen, declining Governor Winslow's appointment to lead an expedition against the Dutch. This quiet colonist, who commanded the Plymouth forces in King Philip's War, pleads his domestic cares:

"My wife, as is well known to the whole town, is not only a weak woman, and has been so all along, but now, by reason of age, being sixty-seven years and upwards, and nature decaying, so her illness grows more strongly upon her. Never a day passes but she is forced to rise at break of day, or before. She cannot lie for want of breath. And when she is up, she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. That day your letter came to my hands, my maid's year being out, she went away, and I cannot get or hear of another. And then in regard of my occasions abroad, for the tending and looking after all my creatures, the fetching home my hay, that is yet at the place where it grew, getting of wood, going to mill, and for the performing all other family occasions, I have now but a small Indian boy about thirteen years of age, to help me. Sir, I can truly say that I do not in the least waive the business out of an effeminate or dastardly spirit, but am as freely willing to serve my King and my country as any man whatsoever, in what I am capable and fitted for, but do not understand that a man is so called to serve his country with the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family."

An "effeminate or dastardly spirit" would indeed be a novelty in the birthplace of James Otis. But it was not only in face of the Indian and the redcoat that these three old towns showed firm courage. To their glory be it remembered that they withstood the persecutor and bluntly refused to enforce the laws against heresy, so that a special officer had to be sent by Plymouth Court to hunt out and oppress the Quakers. Under his petty tyrannies, the faith of the Friends gained many converts, and Quakerism became permanently established on the Cape.

Even Mashpee, once the Indian reservation, but now a little township peopled by half-breeds, mulattoes and a sprinkling of whites, grows tidier and more capable every year. The aborigines of Cape Cod have left slight traces save the melodious names that cling to bay and creek. Arrow-heads are scattered about, and now and then the plough turns up one of the clam-shell hoes with which the Nausets used to till their maize-fields. The Praying Indians of the Cape deserve our memory, for they were always faithful to their English neighbors. When the first regiment was raised in Barnstable County for the Revolutionary War, twenty-two Mashpees enlisted, of whom but one came home. A Praying Indian of Yarmouth has won a place in New England song,--Nauhaught the Deacon, who, hunger-pinched, restored the tempting purse of gold to the Wellfleet skipper and received a tithe "as an honest man."

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