The quiet little town of Eastham, originally “Nawsett,” settled in 1646, only seven years after the three pioneers, Barnstable, Sandwich and Yarmouth, has shared the hard fortunes of the lower Cape. With a remnant of less than five hundred inhabitants, it finds, under the present stress, a resource in asparagus, shipping a carload or two to Boston every morning in the season. To this land industry the ocean consents to contribute, the soil being dressed for “sparrowgrass” with seaweed and shells. But no hardship can deprive Eastham of its history. After the encounter between the Pilgrims and Indians here in 1620, the place was not visited again until the following July, when Governor Bradford sent from Plymouth a boatload of ten men to recover that young scapegrace, John Billington. This boy, whose father, ten years after, was hanged by the colonists for murder, had come near blowing up the _Mayflower_, in Provincetown harbor, by shooting off a fowling-piece in her cabin, close by an open keg of powder, and, later, must needs lose himself in Plymouth woods. He had wandered into the territory of the Nausets, who, although this was the tribe which had suffered from Hunt’s perfidy, restored the lad unharmed to the English. The Nausets further proved their friendliness by supplying the Pilgrims, in the starving time of 1622, with stores of corn and beans. But the following year, suspecting an Indian plot against the colonists, Myles Standish, that “little chimney soon on fire,” appeared upon the Cape in full panoply of war, executed certain of the alleged conspirators and so terrified the rest that many fled to the marshes and miserably perished. [Illustration: OLD WINDMILL, EASTHAM.] The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch. They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings, a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith, Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one hundred and ten, rounding life’s circle so completely that at the end, as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.