He led us downstairs, and out to the large room where they used to do their fireplace cooking. The fireplace is closed now, but the spirit of the house is still one of comfort and hospitable good cheer. From its windows you cannot quite see the place where Myles Standish lived; it is too far away. But it is pleasant to know that the Captain and John Alden were near neighbors, and that one of Myles Standish's sons married one of the daughters of Priscilla. All of Priscilla's eleven children turned out well; many of them were later called to "act in publick stations;" and the old house has been the homestead of her descendants all these years. When we had signed our names in the big register, and turned to go, Barbara said, "Do you know why the Aldens and Standishes left Plymouth and came over here so far?" "Why, they came over to settle it," said Mr. John Alden kindly; "to open it up." [Illustration: The Myles Standish Monument] As we went out down the lane, we turned to take one more look at John Alden's land. There, in the middle foreground, we saw the artist, sketching busily. "How did _you_ get here?" we asked in a breath. "In the car. How did _you_ get here?" "We walked," said Barbara with emphasis. "Like to go the rest of the way by stage?" inquired the artist affably, hoisting his sketching kit over his shoulder and pointing to the car at the foot of the lane. "I'm going over to the Standish house next." "Did you know," said Barbara dreamily to the artist, as she seated herself in the car, "that the four most famous descendants of John Alden and Priscilla were John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Tom Thumb?" "Barbara," said the artist gravely, "did you make that up?" "No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we went around the corner on one wheel, "I looked it up." Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against the sky. We went careening up the side-road to the Standish house, which was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but by one of his sons. It was closed. An old house, locked, with an open field around it and the sea below; a perfect place for sketching, and the rising wind from the sea. Barbara went softly up to the doorway and touched the rusty latch. On one side of the doorstep was a lilac bush, and on the other a wild birch. [Illustration: The Standish House, Duxbury, (1666)]