Two hundred and sixty years ago, and more, the _Mayflower_ anchored in Cape Cod harbor, off what is now Provincetown. Although the settlement of the Pilgrims was finally made at Plymouth, it was at Cape Cod that the first birth and the first death occurred, and that the famous compact of government was signed. It was on Cape Cod that a party under Miles Standish made the first excursion inland, tracked Indians through the woods, laid hold on corn, rifled a wigwam and, with that delicacy which always characterized their captain, explored an Indian grave. Carried by steam, to-day, through the whole length of the Cape, in cars of the latest pattern, raising our eyes from the last novel to look upon stretches of open country, it is hard to frame a vision of Cape Cod as it was when the Pilgrims landed. Shut your eyes to the sand-hills, to all the neglected acres white with daisies or gay with golden-rod; clothe the seventy miles of curving peninsula, except the broad salt-marshes, with forest trees; think of the numberless bays and ponds and streams that light up the country still; picture here and there an Indian clearing, a cluster of wigwams, and a sachem with his followers; fill the woods with deer and wolves and foxes, and you see Cape Cod as it lay on that November morning when the plunge of the _Mayflower’s_ anchor broke the stillness. Soon after the settlement at Plymouth, a trading-house, the foundations of which may still be traced, was built at Manomet, now known as Monument, near the head of Buzzard’s Bay; but the first settlement, properly speaking, on Cape Cod, was made at Sandwich. “April 3, 1637,” say the Plymouth records, “it is also agreed by the court that these ten men of Saugus [naming them] shall have liberty to view a place to sit down, and have land sufficient for three-score families.” In view of the later history of Cape Cod, there is an amusing ring in this liberty to “sit down,” granted to the nucleus of a people who in their growth have shown a constant desire to do anything but sit down; who have disclosed, on the contrary, a most determined disposition “the ocean’s depths to sound, or pierce to either pole”; who hang Calcutta hats upon their hat-trees; whose parlors give out a sandal-wood perfume from the islands of the Pacific. If there was any one form of words that was to prove peculiarly inappropriate to the settlement of Cape Cod, it was this of a liberty to “sit down.”