ng directly to port, for I found three guideboards
at intervals of a mile or two and each announced with monotonous
regularity that it was two and a half miles to Cotuit. When it
comes to making statements the Cape guideboards stand loyally by
one another. But the little town hove above the horizon at last
with its lovely blue bay of warm Gulf-stream water, set in a sweet
curve of white sand and backed by neat cottages bowered in green
trees. It is worth walking across the Cape to reach Cotuit at the
journey's end, but I doubt the eight miles. If it is not fifteen
by way of Wakeby, Mashpee, Santuit and the rest I am mightily
mistaken.

Thoreau with his usual clear gift of prophecy said of the Cape:
"The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for
those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At
present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world and probably
it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin
alley, or a circular railway or an ocean of mint julep, that the
visitor is in search of--if he thinks more of the wine than the
brine, as I suspect some do at Newport--I trust that for a long
time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be
more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable
are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea
shifting the sands. Lynn and Nantucket! this bare and bended arm
it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. What are
springs and water falls? Here is the spring of springs, the
waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the winter is the time to
visit it--a lighthouse or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. A
man may stand there and put all America behind him."

This was all true in Thoreau's day and long after. But the
fashionable world has since found the Cape, and brought its
palatial hotels and its million-dollar cottages to sit down in
friendly fashion among the villagers and share their summer life
with them. Thereby both are benefited. But after all the chief
charm of the Cape is still that vast stretches of it are as free
from fashion as Thoreau said they always would be, and the forests
like those Captain John Smith and Myles Standish, Karlsefne and
Verrizana traversed still grow there in wide stretches.

CHAPTER VIII

WILD APPLE TREES

Coming back to my pastures after long absence I am always
surprised and often otherwise moved at the changes which I can
then clearly s