plying these waters, where, even to-day, there is never traffic sufficient to disturb the pleasing atmosphere of solitude. On a wooded shore there may be a shooting-lodge or a bungalow, a pier with a few boats bobbing at anchor on one lake or another; but for the most part they seem more remote from man than when Indians followed the forest trails and beached their canoes under a shelving bank. [Illustration: THE SHORE ROAD] II There are riches enough for all who love the land: for those who come to play, and those who come chiefly to refresh their memory of the past; for those of the fine old stock who live here year in and year out on the modest competence inherited from seafaring ancestors; and those who fish, or farm, or engage in the important modern industry of ministering to the “summer people.” The quality of the riches, as in any community, may vary with the individual. But save among a negligible few of the idlers—where there is a sinister strain of vice in a “petered-out” neighborhood, or a foolish and incongruous display among some visitors—there is a recognizable inheritance from the men who settled the land: an atmosphere of simplicity, a sturdy instinct of judging one for what he is rather than for what he has, a predilection for healthy pleasures. It is folk of this kind whom the Cape attracts—plain people, if you will; and it is perhaps significant that potent as the land might be to stimulate the imagination, it is only the beguiling “foreign” atmosphere of Provincetown that has fostered anything like a School. Cape Cod: a sandbar, one may have the more excuse for judging, as the land lifts to the wind-swept plains of Truro. There is a change in the aspect of the Cape as it turns due north to brace itself against the thunderous approach of the Atlantic. Straight and defiant, it holds its own to the Clay Pounds at Highland Light, the Indians’ Tashmuit, and then, little by little, the ocean pushes it back and folds it over in the graceful curve of the tip at Provincetown. From the frayed edge of Chatham on the south shore—broken as it is into deep bays with outer shoals and beaches that may alter their whole contour in a winter’s storms—and on the north the snug village of Orleans where the by-roads are the prettiest, we enter upon a new country. It may be remarked in passing that Orleans offers something of martial interest to the traveller there: for at Rock Harbor on the bay was fought the famous Battle of Orleans, an engagement of 1812; and at Nauset Harbor, in the Great War, a German submarine, with some idea, apparently, of defeating a tow of empty coal barges, planted a stray shot on the sandbar at its mouth to the considerable alarm of cottagers in the vicinity.