Here, then, were the original four townships, extending from Buzzard’s Bay to the Province Lands; and it is particularly fortunate, no doubt, that these settlements sufficiently isolated the Indian communities of the Cape before the great conflagration of King Philip’s War, when any concentration of fire there would have been a troublesome matter for the colonists to handle. In 1685, when the colony was divided into its three counties, four more villages—Falmouth, Harwich, Truro, and Chatham—are mentioned, but not until some years later were they set off and incorporated as towns. Later still Dennis, Brewster, Orleans, and Wellfleet were divided from the mother townships, and in 1727 the Province Lands at the tip of the Cape were incorporated as Provincetown, with certain peculiar rights therein reserved to the Government. The setting-off of Brewster, previously the North Parish of Harwich, in 1803, led to an amusing complication that illustrates the fine stiff-necked obstinacy of these men of “the bull-dog breed.” A battle royal was waged between those who did and those who did not advocate the division; and finally the best possible compromise to be had was that he who would not budge from his old allegiance should be permitted his citizenship there, though his estate should lie in the new. Harwich was divided; in the process the new town was splashed with angry patches of the old, and more than one conservative of the North Parish found his freehold tied to the mother town only by a ribbon of winding road. Such a one looked from his windows across jewelled marshes to the alien waters of the bay; and on election day, turning his back on home, crossed the trig waist of the Cape, and cast his ballot in the town set on the sandy inlets of the sea. II