The foreign element in Provincetown is not all Portuguese. There is a sprinkling of many nationalities, especially Irish, and, more numerous yet, English and Scotch from the British provinces, while sailor-feet from all over the globe tread the long plank-walk of Front Street. This famous walk was built, after much wrangling, from the town’s share of the Surplus Revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson, and the story goes that the more stiff-necked opponents of this extravagance refused their lifetimes long to step upon the planks, and plodded indignantly through the sandy middle of the road. Upon this chief thoroughfare stand several churches, looking seaward. Sailors in these waters used to steer by the meeting-house steeples, which are frequent all along the Cape. Some of those early churches now struggle on with meagre congregations, and a few are abandoned, the wind whistling through the empty belfries. Provincetown has a record of ancient strife between the Orthodox and the Methodists. The established sect resented the intrusion of the new doctrine to such a degree that they made a bonfire of the timber designed for the Methodist building. The heretics effectively retaliated by securing the key to the Orthodox meeting-house, locking out the astonished owners, and taking permanent possession, triumphantly singing Methodist hymns to the Orthodox bass-viol. It was thirty-two years before the discomfited Orthodox rallied sufficiently to build themselves another church. Journeying from Provincetown, “perched out on a crest of alluvial sand,” up the wrist of the Cape, one sees the land a-making. At first the loose sand drifts like snow. Then the coarse marsh-grasses begin to bind and hold it, low bushes mat their roots about it, and planted tracts of pitch-pine give the shifting waste a real stability. The Pilgrims found, they said,--but perhaps there was a Canaan dazzle in their eyes,--their landing-place well wooded and the soil “a spit’s depth, excellent black earth.” But now all sods and garden-ground must be brought from a distance, and a mulberry or a sycamore, even the most stunted apple-tree that squats and cowers from the wind, is a proud possession. When President Dwight of Yale rode through Truro into Provincetown a century ago, he was amazed at the sterility and bleak desolation of the landscape, half hidden as it was by “the tempestuous tossing of the clouds of sand.” He was told that the inhabitants were required by law to plant every April bunches of beach-grass to keep the sand from blowing. The national government, stirred by the danger to the harbor, afterwards took the matter in hand. Between 1826 and 1838, twenty-eight thousand dollars were expended in an attempt to strengthen the harbor shores by beach-grass. Of late Massachusetts has become aroused to the desolate condition of her Province Lands, and is making a determined effort to redeem them by the planting of trees and by other restorative measures.