[Illustration: The Winslow House, Marshfield, (1699)] The Winslow mansion, with its great trees and its own broad hearths, has not grown bleak in its old age, or even austere. There is an Indian word preserved for us by Governor Winslow's friend, Roger Williams, that might serve as a motto for this house. "_Nickquenum_" says Roger Williams, "_I am going home_, is a solemn word with them; and no man will offer any hinderance to him, who after some absence is going to visit his family, and useth this word Nickquenum." As we go up the flagstone pathway and lift the Marshfield knocker, we can easily imagine that generations of famous Winslows, returning to their ancestral estate, must have approached this house somewhat in the spirit of that word used by their grandfather's friends the Indians: "Nickquenum, Winsnow!" which is to say, "O Winslow--I am going home." CHAPTER IV THE CAPE If you come from the Firelands in the Middle West, if you discover Cape Cod, if you fall in love with a little empty ninety-five-year-old house there and buy it, with its three acres of pines and locust trees and arbutus and rose bushes--then you long to go to see it after the deed is filed. It may be the dead of winter, but you want to go. You do not want to be merely a "summer person." The sea is rocking with a February gale, and the rain drives over the dunes in slanting gusts. But you go cruising down the Cape in the evening train, disembark two or three stations short of Provincetown, make your way up your lane, unlock your door, light a fire in your stove, set a lamp in your window, and feel that the house has been waiting there all its ninety-five years, for you. If you are generous with your share of the world, you invite your friends. In just this way, our friend from the West filed her deed, built her fire with driftwood and pine cones, set her teakettle on the stove, and sent for Barbara and me to come. We had known Cape Cod in summer, with its blueberries and its sailing-craft, its wharves and artist-colonies and ocean breezes. But we had never seen it in winter, with snow on the sand-dunes and the wind flying over with sleet and rain. An old house with seafaring memories knows how to behave in a storm. At high tide, our house sits up not so very far above the level of the sea. A little Ark on a little Ararat, it was built nearly a century ago by Jonah Atkins for Noah Smith; Noah and Jonah--surely names of men equipped to go a voyage. The lumber for the house had to be brought by ship from Maine, thrown overboard off shore, rafted up to the land in time of high-course tide, spread out on the hill to dry, and then set solidly together, and pegged. Jonah Atkins made his wooden pegs to stay. The gale while we were there blew great ships far out of their course at sea, but there was not a shiver in the timbers of our roof.