Up and down the sandy knolls behind the streets straggle populous graveyards, where one may read the fortunes of Provincetown more impressively, if less precisely, than in the census reports. Where the goodly old Nathaniels and Shubaels and Abrahams and Jerushas rest, a certain decorum of green sodding and white headstone is maintained, despite the irreligious riot of the winds. The Catholic burial-ground, too, is not uncared for in its Irish portion. Marble and granite monuments implore “Lord have mercy on the soul” of some Burke or Ryan or McCarty, but the Portuguese, wanderers from the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores, sleep the sleep of strangers, with no touch of tenderness or beauty about their dreary lodging. Only here and there a little Jacinto or Manuel or Antone has his short mound set about with fragments of clam-shell, as if in children’s play. Some lots are enclosed, the black posts with rounded tops looking like monastic sentries, and a few headboards, with the painted name already rain-washed out of recognition, lean away from the wind. In the centre of this gaunt graveyard, where the roaring Atlantic storms tear up even the coarse tufts of beach-grass, a great gray cross of wood, set in a hill of sand, spreads weather-beaten arms. The guardianship of the Church and the fellowship of the sea these Portuguese fisherfolk brought with them, and as yet America has given them nothing dearer. The Portuguese constitute a large proportion of the foreign element in Barnstable County, where nearly nine tenths of the people are of English descent. The protruding tip of Cape Cod easily catches such ocean drift as these Western Islanders, and they have made their way as far up the Cape as Falmouth, where they watch their chance to buy old homesteads at low rates. They are natural farmers and even in Harwich and Truro divide their labors between sea and land. But it is in Provincetown that these swart-faced strangers most do congregate, gardening wherever a garden is possible, tending the fish-weirs, working, when herring are plenty, in the canning factories, and almost monopolizing the fresh fishing industry. Even those who are most thrifty, building homes and buying vessels, wear the look of aliens, and some, when their more active years are over, gather up their savings and return to the Azores; but the raven-haired girls are beginning to listen to Yankee wooers, and the next century may see the process of amalgamation well under way. Already these new Pilgrims have tasted so much of the air of freedom as to wax a little restive under the authority of their fiery, devoted young priest, who upbraids them with his last expletive for their shortcomings as energetically as he aids them with his last dollar in their distress.