As cabin boy, forem’st hand, able seaman, mate, or captain, on merchant vessel or fisherman, every man Jack in the village was pretty sure to have had his taste of the sea, and thereby was equipped to contribute his story to the common fund of anecdote. With truth he could say “I am a part of all that I have met.” And whether they had followed the sea for one year or forty, or vicariously through the experience of others, each of them had a tang of “the old salt”; and their home was set in the ocean as surely as if Cape Cod were another Saint Helena breaking the long Atlantic rollers that come sweeping down the world. Many a time, indeed, it must have seemed to swing to their stories like the deck of a ship, and the dry land under foot to be stable only because one was braced to its motion. For most of the men, all the sea ways about the world were as familiar as the village road around the ponds. Daniel Webster once wrote some friends in Dennis of a trial in their district when question arose as to the entrance of the harbor of Owhyhee: “The counsel for the opposite party proposed to call witnesses to give information to the jury. I at once saw a smile which I thought I understood, and suggested to the judge that very probably some of my jury had seen the entrance themselves. Upon which seven out of the twelve arose and said they were quite familiarly acquainted with it, having seen it often.” Every boy had some grounding in the common branches of study at the schools which his Pilgrim ancestors had been at pains to establish; but given the three R’s, his education was expanded in the larger school of personal adventure. Rich gives a quick biography typical of the Truro fisherman: “Till ten in summer—a barefoot boy, tough, wide-awake—hoes, clams, fishes, swims, goes to the red schoolhouse taught by the village schoolmarm. After ten, on board a fishing vessel cooking for nine or ten men; at thirteen a _hand_; goes to the same schoolhouse three months or less every winter till seventeen or eighteen; graduates. At twenty-one marries; goes skipper; twenty-five buys a vessel and builds a house, or has been looking around the world to make a change. Whatever may be the experiences of after life, the early history of Cape Cod boys could be summed substantially as stated.” This matter of an elementary education, in the early days, was frequently undertaken by men whose work was cut out for them to keep their own knowledge a little in advance of their scholars. There was Mr. Hawes, schoolmaster of Yarmouth in the later years of the eighteenth century, who gloried in the fact that “The little learning I have gained, Was most from simple nature drained.”