But in winter there is a different story of savage surf and an ocean that flings up its spume near two hundred feet to the starved grass of the upland. Such clamor is unbelievable in the pearly haze of summer; but even then an infrequent nor'caster may whip the Atlantic into a hungry rage as if to send it leaping over the puny barrier that divides the outer uproar from the gray dogs of the bay that are showing their teeth to the gale.

Provincetown is a story in itself. The village, with its ingredients of old Cape Cod and a large proportion of handsome, gentle-mannered folk from the East Atlantic Islands, is curled comfortably about the edge of its harbor. It has been said that Provincetown has the "privilege of turning to look at itself like a happy child who has donned a long train," and there is an evening picture of the "circlet of lights with a background of slender spires and hills, a friendly beacon shining over the narrow spit of land at Wood End." Picturesque and picturesque: one wears the words threadbare - picturesque in summer, with the flicker of shadow and sun, sharp-cut, exotic, the brightly dressed folk thronging the streets or hailing one another from the windows above; picturesque, with a difference, in the less exciting atmosphere of winter when the town is comfortably full of its own people busy about their affairs, which more often than not means preparing for the harvest that summer is to bring them. The harbor is a picture at high tide or low, with the boats anchored in the roadstead or moored to the wharves; or the

sun slanting across the sandflats where a dory is stranded by the tide, and its master, dark-ringletted, slouch-hatted, a red kerchief knotted at his throat, a red flower in his shirt, strides shorewards with his catch dripping in its creel. The fish-wharves make a painter's fingers itch to be at work, and many are those who respond to the impulse. No small part of the vivacity of the summer scene is furnished by the artists and their easels and their colors — artists who express what they see after a method that would horrify the ladies of the earlier era that is our particular affair.

The soil is sand, and it is said that the gardens of the town were imported by returning shipmasters who, in more fertile regions, steved their holds with loam for ballast and dumped it in their own front yards. However that may be, the little gardens are as pretty as in any English village; a vista harborwards through bright plantations of hollyhock is something to remember. And there are many trees sheltering the houses and yards: silver abeles, and elms, and willows, the old willows "Way up along.” The scene to-day is perhaps unduly dominated by the Monument, which with time may develop a closer familiarity with its environment. Springing from clustering trees on a low eminence above the town, graceful in itself, it is as much a memorial to the indefatigable will of one of the last of the deep-water captains as to his forbears, the Pilgrims. In season and out he worked for its accomplishment, with the result that a colossal Sienese bell-tower, supplementing as it were

the enterprise of Columbus, the Genoan, pins firmly in place the sands of Cape Cod.

The village is bounded by wooded hills, and a drive oceanward brings us to the dunes where the State, year after year, has waged war with the drifting sand of its Province Lands. Life-saving stations and beacons are set at short intervals, and are needed, on this shore, and out there lie the great shoals of the Peaked Hill Bar, the cruellest of all the coast, where ship after ship has piled her bones, and men by the hundred have gone to their death. To the eye, in a crisp north wind, they present only lines of vivid jadegreen water set in the wide field of blue; and here sea and shore give such promise of variety as makes one long to watch the seasons through in sun and storm and shrouding mists. The dunes that are no other color than that of sand, ever responsive to the changing mood of the atmosphere, are covered now and then by carpets of growth that run from dull green to the purple of winter; and they and the bluffs beyond them are no more constant in aspect than their neighbor the sea. Far from depressing the spirit, they stimulate keen anticipation of what the hour shall bring forth and a sense that whatever its fruit one shall be great enough to share it. Of all the places one has seen here it is most fitting that man should dare to be free.

III

FROM the slender tip of Champlain's Cap Blanc to Wareham one is never out of sight of water: salt here

and salt there, ocean and inlet and bay; and the great ponds of the uplands, or deep in its swampy covert a lake dropped from the jewelled chain. among the hills. In the towns nearer the mainland are creeks and brooks and tiny runlets, flooded cranberry swamps, a ditch choked with the lush growth it nourishes; or near the beach a peat bog may wink unexpectedly from its bosky rim where a colony of night heron have nested to be near their feedingground in the bay. And when the tide is at ebb they and the seagulls wheel out there in airy platoons that manœuvre as if to catch the light on their ermine or sleek surtouts of gray. On the drying sands the gulls teeter about like high-heeled ladies on an esplanade until a stranded minnow changes the play and they pounce and cuff and scream like boys greedy for a penny. There are rich harvests for the hungry on these wide reaches of the sandflats, and even a glutton bird could gorge his fill upon the prey entrapped in the fish-weirs that dot the inner coast.

There, at one point, the tide marches out a long mile to the Great Bar and back again, by appointed channels, unhurrying, punctual to the minute, to keep its tryst with the shore. Sailors, unless they have a care to the time, are likely to be "hung up" on the Bar; but for one ashore who looks out to the white line of breaking foam, every moment of the ebb and turn has its special beauty. In bright days the shoaling waters show a lovely interlacement of greens and blue; but when the sky is shrouded in gray, fold upon fold, and the sun, invisible, steps softly westward,

their surface is like burnished metal, although a painter's eye would discern there a pastel of mauves and pink and blue and a whole chromatic scale of green. White sandflats, disclosed by the ebb, are carved in whorls like a shell by the hand of the tide. Inshore plumy grasses fringe them; here and there infinitesimal forms of life stain them amethyst or green. But the wide sweep of them responds to some subtile quality in the day, and they are plains of pearl where cloudy shadows drift, or, in certain golden hours, they burn with color like some jewelled marquetry of the East. A flaming sunset walks them with feet of blood. And day after day they, or the waters above them, surprise us with some new sweet diversity.

A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun-water and sky and the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea- the bay, seeming all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among the hills. Above the beaches, now and again, stand groves of pines, homely thurifers that incense the breeze as it passes. And where the line of shore dips to a lowland, the salt marshes, with their exquisite adjustment to the season, are a treasury of beauty-rich greens flushing and dying to the bronze, studded with haycocks