Unlike some abandoned farm sites in other parts of New England, there is nothing left here to show what the inhabitants did. There are no harrows, stone bolts, yokes, or farm implements, not even any pots and pans. The stones are left, and the faithful grasses, and beyond them the crunchy, gray deer moss, and beard grass of indigenous fields. It was a small place, of bare subsistence. Whatever the qualities of the people who lived there, they left simplicity behind them. Not too far away, a bulldozer is making a desert with giant scoops, high-tension wires are marching by, and a plane rips the air overhead. We are encroaching in our oblivious fashion, without delay. The new domesticities may occupy only a tenth of an acre each, but they engage all lands. The old domestic wildness cannot be replaced. It was a lodgment limited by need, gray outside and dark within, perhaps unbearably close and confined at times, but with a knowledge of its earth. It seems to me that as the world has grown outward in recent years, even I, a comparative newcomer to Cape Cod, have lost some local life to memory. When you live in a place for the first time you see behind it to its roots and grain, before the storms of circumstance blow you away from it. I remember a few old men who seemed so representative of the old Cape that it will never be the same now that they are gone. The loss is of a country speech, the flavor of a flesh and blood nurtured on locality. What has replaced them can be defined in terms of California as well as Cape Cod, which means no detriment to either, for what we are now obliged to consider is locality in a wider field. But those old men were born as we may not yet be born, sturdily, in custom and resignation. Nathan Black died in October 1957, at the age of ninety-two. He was born in 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was a near neighbor. His land abutted mine, and since he was the proprietor of the Black Hills Barber Shop, I could walk down through the woods to get my hair cut, for the price, in a trillion-dollar world, of fifty cents. He was a heavy man, with bright brown eyes, and a head of curly white hair. He fitted the open Cape Cod weather, or the weather fitted him. I am not sure of the distinction. Nearly ninety years of change, of natural cataclysm, of both peace and abysmal war in the human world, had left him in the same place, with the same measure, outwardly at least, of stability. When he left his place, or the customary orbit of work and old friends that constituted his life, perhaps to drive out on a new highway or to the chain store, he may never have stopped being surprised. I remember his looking at me with a kind of amused questioning--but no alarm--and saying something about no one belonging here any more. The new population didn’t quite make sense to him.