Provincetown is a story in itself. The village, with its ingredients of old Cape Cod and a large proportion of handsome, gentle-mannered folk from the East Atlantic Islands, is curled comfortably about the edge of its harbor. It has been said that Provincetown has the “privilege of turning to look at itself like a happy child who has donned a long train,” and there is an evening picture of the “circlet of lights with a background of slender spires and hills, a friendly beacon shining over the narrow spit of land at Wood End.” Picturesque and picturesque: one wears the words threadbare—picturesque in summer, with the flicker of shadow and sun, sharp-cut, exotic, the brightly dressed folk thronging the streets or hailing one another from the windows above; picturesque, with a difference, in the less exciting atmosphere of winter when the town is comfortably full of its own people busy about their affairs, which more often than not means preparing for the harvest that summer is to bring them. The harbor is a picture at high tide or low, with the boats anchored in the roadstead or moored to the wharves; or the sun slanting across the sandflats where a dory is stranded by the tide, and its master, dark-ringletted, slouch-hatted, a red kerchief knotted at his throat, a red flower in his shirt, strides shorewards with his catch dripping in its creel. The fish-wharves make a painter’s fingers itch to be at work, and many are those who respond to the impulse. No small part of the vivacity of the summer scene is furnished by the artists and their easels and their colors—artists who express what they see after a method that would horrify the ladies of the earlier era that is our particular affair. The soil is sand, and it is said that the gardens of the town were imported by returning shipmasters who, in more fertile regions, steved their holds with loam for ballast and dumped it in their own front yards. However that may be, the little gardens are as pretty as in any English village; a vista harborwards through bright plantations of hollyhock is something to remember. And there are many trees sheltering the houses and yards: silver abeles, and elms, and willows,—the old willows “Way up along.” The scene to-day is perhaps unduly dominated by the Monument, which with time may develop a closer familiarity with its environment. Springing from clustering trees on a low eminence above the town, graceful in itself, it is as much a memorial to the indefatigable will of one of the last of the deep-water captains as to his forbears, the Pilgrims. In season and out he worked for its accomplishment, with the result that a colossal Sienese bell-tower, supplementing as it were the enterprise of Columbus, the Genoan, pins firmly in place the sands of Cape Cod.