denuded English “Forest,” and sinks away into meadow, or marsh, or hollows overflowing with the warm perfumes of blossomy growth. And everywhere there is color: in hill and lowland, in circles of swampy bush, in salt creek and dune. Even the motorist, projected through the country with a slip, a flash, a change too swift for the eye to note its intimate charm, is caught by the cheerfulness of green and blue and dazzling white, and more blue, the blue of salt water, clasping all. One may concede at once that it is a country adapted to the pleasure of summer folk, if they be not set upon taking their pleasure too seriously where there are neither mountains to climb nor big game to hunt, and the soft air does not invite to endeavor. But the wind sweeps clean from ocean to bay and picks up in passing resinous scents of the pine; sands reflect magic lights of rose and pearl; the townships to the north, as Robert Cushman reported of Plymouth, are “full of dales and meadow ground as England is”; and the long sweep of the outer shore, south, east, and north, is extraordinarily varied and broken; deep inlets cool the air of the warmest months, islands that yesterday were not and to-morrow may be destroyed by the tides interlace the coast with shallow lagoons where children sail their boats, bluffs carry the eye out to the clear distances of the ocean, and there are harbors where, on a misty day, buildings loom like “tower’d Camelot.” Tides rise and fall in the salt rivers that wander through marshlands to give changing beauty to the scene; lakes tempt the fisherman; and for more ambitious sport one may put to sea and return at night, whether lucky or not, with the fine philosophy engendered by a ravenous appetite and the sure prospect of excellent food to stay it. But perhaps the ultimate charm of the Cape is that, like a child, it is small enough to be loved. For the native-born, returning here in middle age, there is the delight of coming back to little things that memory had held as stupendous: a dim foreign township that used to be reached in a day’s journey with “carryall and pair” is only five miles distant by the Lower Road; the Great Square proves to be within the swing of an hour’s stroll; the “cap’n’s” a modest mid-Victorian mansion with library and drawing-room that had the remembered vista of Versailles. Yet, in their degree, this charm is free to the stranger. The Cape has a whimsical and endearing smallness: its greatest amplitude can boast but a few miles; and the most tortuous wood road that promised a day’s excursion through an uncharted wilderness will soon show you, from some gentle eminence, the true north to be reckoned by the curve of the bay.