"Isn't this a sea-going promontory?" inquired our proud freeholder, as we watched a sea-gull flap its way up against the rain, alight on the water, and swim toward our territory over the gusty brine. "This, you see, is high-course tide," our friend went on, with that double vanity that comes from being the possessor of a new estate and a new vocabulary. "But it never makes in beyond this Point. The Indians used to have their wigwam here before the house was built." Barbara and I instantly adopted for our own permanent possession the sea-going promontory, the gulls and the high tide sailing up around our premises, and the house itself. [Illustration: "The Ark"] During our sojourn on the Cape, we learned just one thing that we can be sure of: You should never make any general statement whatever about Cape Cod. If you do, you will find your statement disproved by the next turn of the tide, or turn of the road. You mention the fact that Bartholomew Gosnold discovered it in 1602, naming it Cape Cod because there his boat was so "pestered" with codfish. And a well-informed friend will set you right by explaining how the Vikings discovered it some six hundred years earlier. Or perhaps you are interested in weather-vanes. After inspecting them on all the barns down the Cape, you say that all weather-vanes here are codfish; some flat codfish, some solid, but all cod. Instantly you look up and see a beautiful swordfish afloat over the roof of your neighbor's barn. Perhaps you see Barnstable in midwinter, with its marshlands and shores packed with cakes of ice, pink and lavender in the sunset, with sea-gulls sitting upright on the edges, like so many penguins on an Arctic floe. You decide that the Cape harbors are full of ice. But if you inspect the harbor of Provincetown on that same day, you are likely to find not a scrap of ice on the premises.