Life at the Cape flowed on with simple annals to mark its course. In 1687 a mill for grinding corn was set up at Barnstable, to the wonder of the Indians who took it for a monster with arms—the precursor of the winged mills that once dotted the Cape from shoulder to tip and played no small part in the charm of its picture. At Barnstable, too, was the first mill to “full and draw the town’s cloth on reasonable terms,” to the satisfaction, one may suppose, of busy workers at spinning-wheel and loom. And the erection of a mill at Yarmouth was even celebrated in verse: “The Baxter boys they built a mill, Sometimes it went, sometimes stood still; And when it went, it made no noise, Because ’twas built by Baxter’s boys.” In 1694 Harwich was set off from Eastham, and it is said that Patrick Butler walked all the way to Boston to secure the act of incorporation. In 1709 Truro, also, with the usual stipulation that it “procure and settle a learned and godly minister,” was set off from Eastham, which, indeed, as Pamet, it had long antedated in settlement. In 1705 there had been an abortive attempt to incorporate this district as Dangerfield, and in 1718 there was a motion to set off the future Wellfleet as Poole; but nothing further was heard of these names. There had always been wrangling over the settlement at Mannomoit, at the elbow of the Cape: first attached to Yarmouth, then to Eastham, in 1688 it was made an independent “constablerick,” and in 1712 was incorporated as Chatham. In 1714 the Province Lands became the Precinct of Cape Cod under the “constablerick” of Truro, and there was a tax of fourpence for the upkeep of a minister there. But evidently Truro had trouble with her ward—the population was a drifting one, for the most part irresponsible fishermen and adventurers—and in 1715 she petitioned the General Court that the new Precinct be “declared either a part of Truro or not a part of Truro, that the town may know how to act in regard to some persons.” From the beginning, with a care to the preservation of crops, householders were required to kill blackbirds and crows, and there was a large bounty on wolves. In 1717 there was even talk of building “a high fence of palisades or boards” across the Cape between Sandwich and Wareham “to keep wolves from coming into the county.” But there were two points of view for that question, and the scheme, opposed by some within on the score of expense and by others without who did not “wish all the wolves to be shut out of the county upon their own limits,” was soon abandoned. In 1721 there was a fearful epidemic of smallpox throughout the State; and Cotton Mather, who favored inoculation, was held by the pious to prefer “the machinations of men to the all-wise providence of God.”