So, at last, all the cars were gone and Scargo Hill was left alone to drowse away the first early hours of a bright new day. Below on the highway the street lights had gone out and, one by one, so had the night lights in the old white houses along the way. From some houses the first, gray curls of smoke from a morning fire drifted upwards. And Easter Sunday, at the rising of the sun, had come to the Cape. NOR’EASTER Sometime in a Cape November there will come the first real Nor’easter, punching an effective period to the end of Fall. Then the winds come roaring out of the northeast to whip the waters of the Cape into a white frenzy and howl around the corners of old houses. These are the winds that rattle the store signs along Main Street while torrential rains beat against the plate glass windows and the shoppers are not there. It is a time to spend indoors, huddled up to the warmth of stove or open hearth, while the sturdy Cape houses settle down into the wind to weather it out. Above stairs the old houses yield gently to the wind in a motion that is reminiscent of the roll of a ship at sea. Like the ship, they will ride out this storm as they have many another throughout a long two centuries. When a Nor’easter has passed, or settled down to a dull roar, it is a time for the Outer Beach, that magnificent stretch of shoreline that skirts the Cape from Provincetown to Chatham. One early Saturday in November I reached the Nauset Coast Guard Beach just as the peak of the high tide reached the shore and the unleashed fury of an angry Atlantic beat against the land to create one of the Cape’s most terrifying and awesome sights. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sun was trying to break through the overcast but the seas piled higher and higher, as if through their own momentum. The whole surface of the sea was a menacing mass of tortured white breakers which threw their spume in smokey clouds a hundred feet into the air. The breakers themselves reached heights of over fifty feet and followed one upon another with such savage intensity that there was hardly any distinguishing between them. They tossed a mass of miscellaneous lumber about with incredible ease. At the near shore a huge, battered scow rolled over and over and was finally spewed out upon the beach, while out in the troughs of the waves several telephone poles and a tremendous, up-rooted tree were tossed about as lightly as if they had been matchsticks. The shore was rapidly becoming littered with the toll of the storm, an extraordinary collection of objects of every size, color and shape, each with a story of its own, each with a beginning of its own, united by their common destination--the outer beach of the Cape. Each of them was smothered in a cottony mass of foam that writhed in the wind and was iridescent in the wavering sunlight and piled upon the beach like banks of snow before a plow.