Since the Revolution, Provincetown has steadily progressed in numbers and prosperity, until to-day, with over four thousand five hundred inhabitants, it is the banner town of the Cape. During this period of development, the Province Lands, several thousand acres in extent, naturally became a subject of dispute. Old residents had fallen into a way of buying and selling the sites on which they had built homes and stores, as if the land were theirs in legal ownership. Five years ago, however, the General Court virtually limited State ownership to the waste tracts in the north and west of the township, leaving the squatters in possession of the harbor-front. “The released portion of the said lands,” stated the Harbor and Land Commissioners in their report of 1893, “is about 955 acres and includes the whole inhabited part of the town of Provincetown.” The present Provincetown is well worth a journey. From High Pole Hill, a bluff seventy feet high in the rear of the populated district, one gazes far out over blue waters, crossed with cloud-shadows and flecked with fishing-craft. Old sea-captains gather here with spy-glasses to make out the shipping; bronzed sailor-boys lie in the sun and troll snatches of song; young mothers of dark complexion and gay-colored dress croon lullabies, known in Lisbon and Fayal, over sick babies brought to the hilltop for the breezy air; the very parrot that a black-eyed urchin guards in a group of admiring playmates talks “Portugee.” Leaning over the railing, one looks down the bushy slope of the bluff to the curious huddle of houses at its base. Out from the horseshoe bend of shore, run thin tongues of wharf and jetty. Front Street follows the water-line, a seaport variety of outfitting stores and shops, mingled with hotels, fish-flakes, shipyards and the like, backing on the beach, with the dwelling-houses opposite facing the harbor-view. Back Street copies the curve of Front, and the two are joined by queer, irregular little crossways, that take the abashed wayfarer close under people’s windows and along the very borders of their gardens and poultry-yards. Although nearly all of the buildings stand on one or the other of these main streets, there are bunches and knots of houses in sheltered places, looking as if the blast had blown them into accidental nooks. In general these houses are built close and low, tucked in under one another’s elbows, but here and there an independent cottage thrusts its sharp-roofed defiance into the very face of the weather. [Illustration: WHARVES AT PROVINCETOWN.]