[Illustration] [Illustration] Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau Author of “A Week on the Concord,” “Walden,” “Excursions,” “The Maine Woods,” etc. ILLUSTRATED BY CLIFTON JOHNSON [Illustration] NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1908 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. Contents INTRODUCTION I. The Shipwreck II. Stage-coach Views III. The Plains Of Nauset IV. The Beach V. The Wellfleet Oysterman VI. The Beach Again VII. Across the Cape VIII. The Highland Light IX. The Sea and the Desert X. Provincetown ILLUSTRATIONS The Clam-Digger (Photogravure) Cohasset—The little cove at Whitehead promontory An old windmill A street in Sandwich The old Higgins tavern at Orleans A Nauset lane Nauset Bay A scarecrow Millennium Grove camp-meeting grounds A Cape Cod citizen Wreckage under the sand-bluff Herring River at Wellfleet A characteristic gable with many windows A Wellfleet oysterman Wellfleet Hunting for a leak Truro—Starting on a voyage Unloading the day’s catch A Truro footpath Truro meeting-house on the hill A herd of cows Pond Village Dragging a dory up on the beach An old wrecker at home The Highland Light Towing along shore A cranberry meadow The sand dunes drifting in upon the trees The white breakers on the Atlantic side In Provincetown harbor Provincetown—A bit of the village from the wharf The day of rest A Provincetown fishing-vessel INTRODUCTION Of the group of notables who in the middle of the last century made the little Massachusetts town of Concord their home, and who thus conferred on it a literary fame both unique and enduring, Thoreau is the only one who was Concord born. His neighbor, Emerson, had sought the place in mature life for rural retirement, and after it became his chosen retreat, Hawthorne, Alcott, and the others followed; but Thoreau, the most peculiar genius of them all, was native to the soil. In 1837, at the age of twenty, he graduated from Harvard, and for three years taught school in his home town. Then he applied himself to the business in which his father was engaged,—the manufacture of lead pencils. He believed he could make a better pencil than any at that time in use; but when he succeeded and his friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune he responded that he would never make another pencil. “Why should I?” said he. “I would not do again what I have done once.”