This is probably the oldest of the gambrel-roofed houses on the harbor. There is something very strong and homely about the pitch of the roof--a balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with the huge chimney and low walls. A weathered gambrel has a way of looking at home in the fields, a sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Standish house, with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, looks like a very old settler indeed. For a long time we sat on the doorstep and watched the outline of Plymouth Town across the harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the crows. The son of Standish of Standish knew where to pitch a house. Thoreau criticizes the Pilgrims for lacking the explorer's instinct. They were not woodsmen, he says, nor, except spiritually, pioneers at heart. He calls attention to the fact that it was long after the landing before they explored the woods and ponds back of Plymouth, territory "within the compass of an afternoon's ramble." "A party of emigrants to California or Oregon," says he, "with no less work on their hands and more hostile Indians, would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree." Well, the Sieur de Champlain had not with him such little travelers as Oceanus Hopkins and Peregrine White. After the deaths of the first winter, every one of the few grown men left in the colony was needed for immediate affairs. They could not afford to go exploring overmuch. With the exception of the madcap Billingtons and one boy Crackston, they ran very little risk of losing themselves in the woods. They went, as much as possible by sea, to Kennebeck, to Boston, to all parts of Cape Cod. But as to wandering through the woods on foot, that was done only for good and warrantable reasons, not to see what they could see.