You might as well confine yourself to particulars, and avoid large sayings of any sort. Thoreau is properly cautious about this. Even when he speaks of so simple a matter as the rarity of dogs and cats on the Atlantic side of the Cape, he guards his speech. "Still less," says he, "could you think of a cat bending her steps that way and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; _yet even this happens sometimes, they tell me._" They told him the truth. A fine, enormous, distinguished-looking white cat, sitting on your doorstep at the foot of the pilaster of your doorway, is as common on some parts of the Cape as the pointed Christmas-trees in green tubs on the doorsteps of old houses in certain cities inland. Remarkable cats, brindle or yellow or tiger or snowball or gray, they are loved while they live, lamented when they die. "If I could look out of the window," said a little boy whose favorite cat had died, "and see my Bobbie coming down the road, wouldn't I wun to let him in?" The Cape Cod cats are not confined to doorsteps. They catch the Cape Cod mice. And at least one elegant pure-white cat of our acquaintance goes stepping down the Cape with her master, shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic, perhaps, but waiting until it is time to go back, and then escorting him home. Therefore, since it is so unsafe to generalize, we are resolved to make no sweeping statements about the Cape Cod house. You cannot be too sure even about your own. You discover this when you take its measurements for curtains and wall-paper; no two apertures and no two surfaces are alike. But, with due reservations, there is one sort of old house that was most nearly standardized by the early builders: the low-studded, story-and-a-half house, with its long gable roof, its many little windows tucked up under the point of the gable, its front to the south, its "West Entry" at one side, and its six-panel door, with a row of little square glass panes above it---sometimes a row of four lights, sometimes five. More rarely there is a fan-light over the door, curving out to the pilasters at each side. All this varies a little, and most of the houses have been altered more or less by subsequent generations. But whenever you come upon the regulation, unspoiled Cape Cod house, there is a general plan that you recognize at once. For example: the term "West Entry" is no idle phrase. West Entry means west entry, regardless of your angle to the road. Your house faces the south, and your side entry faces west, though the road may run at random on a wild slant, and though your west entry open on the midst of the sea. It does not matter whether you face the highway or not, does it? A road is a perishable and human thing at best; but the points of the compass mean business on the Cape.