The Cape Codders who had participated in the harvest of the burlap bags full of straw-covered bottles of joy were following a time-honored tradition of beach-combing and salvage. Many would have been incredulous at the suggestion that any gift of the sea was not rightfully a case of finders-keepers. It is doubtful that any game of finders-keepers was ever carried out with greater enthusiasm until, at last, the Volstead Act was repealed and the liquor traffic came to a halt. For some it had not been the proudest page in Cape Cod history but it had undeniably been one of the most interesting. _There is this much too about the Cape. There is people. There have been--and will be again--some very great ones, and there have been and will be again some middling poor ones. There are heroes of song and story, and there are the everyday kind of heroes who live brave and good lives and no one hears about it. A Cape Codder is not much of a one for blowing his own horn. He’s not much of a one for an argument either. His response to the perpetrator of an intolerable rudeness is to ignore him. That is why some Mainlanders go home to lecture folks about the “coldness” of Cape Codders. There is an inherent wholesomeness about him which, like his work and play, his home and health, is colored by the land and sea and the salt breezes that sweep over them. The land and the sea have worked upon him just as surely as he has worked upon the land and the sea. And when he goes away it is to dream of a cottage by the sea and a coming back to the land that is home._ “J.F.” My good friend, J.F. Small, who kept a grocery store in our Cape village, might not be considered a great man by today’s standards but I considered him to be in the years that I was growing up and I always shall. He was kind and honest and efficient and he had a philosophy that was the equal of any situation.