The beauty of the upper Cape, culminating in the lovely town of Falmouth, is largely rural and sylvan. A system of dyking has, within the last fifty years, converted much of the salt marsh to good, fresh meadow, and, from Orleans up, the look of the country is more and more agricultural. Portions of Yarmouth are well wooded, and in Barnstable, Sandwich and Falmouth are depths of forest where the fox and the deer run wild. The wolf alone has been exterminated, and that with no small trouble, the Cape finally proposing, after grisly heads had been nailed on all her meeting-houses, to build a high fence along her upper border and shut the wolves out. But Plymouth and Wareham objected, from their side of the question, to having the wolves shut in, and this ingenious scheme had to be abandoned. These woodlands are dotted in profusion with silvery ponds, which the Fish Commission at Wood’s Holl keeps well stocked. Often the north side, as in Sandwich, is skirted by long stretches of unreclaimed marsh, over which the heron flaps, with the distinguished air of an old resident, and from which the sweet whistle of the marsh quail answers the “Bob White” of the woods. There is plenty of rock in this landscape, the backbone of the Cape jutting through. Barnstable proudly exhibits four hundred feet of wall, two feet in width, wrought from a single mass of granite found within her limits. Falmouth arbutus grows pinkest about the base of a big boulder known as City Rock, and a field of tumbled stones upon her Quisset road is accounted for on the hypothesis that here the Devil, flying with his burden over to Nantucket, “broke his apron-string.” The trees, too, are of goodly size and stand erect. Elms, silver-leaf poplars, balm of Gileads, great sycamores, spotted with iron-rust lichen, [Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF FALMOUTH.] and willows, lemon yellow in the sun, shade the waysides. Golden-winged woodpeckers and red-shouldered blackbirds dart to and fro, while the abundance of jaunty martin-houses shows that Cape Cod hospitality is not limited to the human. The quiet, white homesteads, with green blinds, broad porches and sometimes a cupola for the sea-view, stand in a sweet tranquillity and dignity that should abash the showy summer residence. But these old-fashioned homes keep up with the times. Against the well-sweep leans the bicycle. The dooryards are blue with myrtle, or pink with rose-bushes, or gay with waving daffodils. Old age is in fashion on the Cape. When twilight fades, the passer-by sees gathered about the early evening lamp the white heads of those whose “chores” are done. And though death comes at last, the cemeteries are so tenderly kept that the grave is robbed of half its dread. Even in the oldest burial-grounds, where the worn, scarred stones lean with the privilege of age, the staring death’s-heads are cozily muffled in moss, and “Patience, wife of Experience,” sleeps under a coverlet of heartsease.