warrior, they made him the commander of their standing army of twelve men. Is is said that there have been only two renowned military chieftains in history who were personally acquainted with all their soldiers—Julius Cæsar and Miles Standish. The redoubtable old captain lost his wife Rose soon after the landing, and he then engaged the fascinating and youthful Alden to do his courtship for him and woo the gentle Priscilla Mullins, with the usual result that the maiden preferred the more attractive Alden to the grim old soldier. Standish has been described as "a short man, very brave, but impetuous and choleric, and his name soon became a terror to all hostile Indians." His is the romance of early Plymouth, for he has been made the hero of Longfellow's poem, and of renowned operas and many New England tales, while the fair Priscilla gave her name to the great Long Island Sound steamer. Standish lived upon the "Captain's Hill," out on the Duxbury peninsula, the highest land thereabout, rising one hundred and eighty feet, upon a broad point projecting into Plymouth Bay. His monument is near the site of his house upon the bare-topped, oval-shaped hill, a rather bleak place, however, to have selected for a home. Beyond it the projecting Duxbury Beach ends in the high Gurnet, with twin lighthouses, and then hooks inward to another bold terminating bulb, the headland of Saquish. To the northward is Clark's Island, where the Pilgrims first landed, a similarly round-topped mass rising from the water. Thus is Plymouth Bay environed, for to the southward its long guarding ridge on that side, Manomet, projects far into the sea.

CAPE COD.

The Old Bay State presents a front to the rough Atlantic like a gladiator at bay. She has in Cape Cod one defensive forearm boldly extended, and she likewise is prepared, if necessary, to thrust out the other, which keeps close guard upon her rugged granite breast in Cape Ann. These capes are the portals of Massachusetts Bay, and of the ocean entrance to Boston. Everyone, in viewing the map, marvels at the extraordinary formation of Cape Cod. Thoreau, who in days gone by tramped all over the Cape, says, "A man may stand there and put all America behind him." This great sandy headland stretches eastward from the mainland at Sandwich about thirty miles, then turns north and northwest thirty miles more, finally terminating in a huge hook, bent around to the south and east again, and forming the spacious landlocked harbor of Provincetown. At Harwich and Chatham the elbow sharply bends, the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay, the wrist at Truro, and the closing fingers make Provincetown's haven. The Cape is nearly all white sand, with boulders occasionally appearing, particularly near the extremity. Thin layers of soil extend as far as Truro, but the sand is seen through many rents, and the extremity is completely bare, being a wilderness of sand, kept in partial motion by the winds, and making constantly shifting dunes. The prevalent northeast winds and surf are regarded as having made the hooked end of the Cape by gradually moving the sands upon the shore around to the west and south. This hooked end impressed the Colonial navigators, and the ancient Dutch maps call it Staaten Hoeck, and the enclosed waters Staaten Bay. The extremely white sand, in contrast with the darker rocks of more northern shores, led Champlain to name it Cape Blanc. Gosnold, as already announced, from the abundance of codfish named it Cape Cod, whereof the faithful historian, Cotton Mather, who records the fact, writes naïvely that he supposes it will never lose its name "till swarms of codfish be seen swimming on the highest hills."

This remarkable cape came near being an island, Buzzard's Bay on the south and Cape Cod bay on the north being so deeply indented that their waters approach within about seven miles. The isthmus is a low, broad alluvial valley stretching between, having Monumet River flowing from Herring Pond south into Buzzard's Bay, and the Scusset River north from the divide, their headwaters only a thousand yards apart, so that this narrow neck of land, nowhere elevated more than twenty-five feet, is all that saves the famous Cape from being an island. A canal was projected there as early as 1676, and the proposed "Cape Cod Ship Canal" has been regularly agitated ever since, and may at some time be constructed, saving the shipping from the long detour around the Cape. This neck has been called "the collar of the Cape," and beyond was the Indian domain of Monomoy. Chatham then was Nauset, and Barnstable was Cummaquid, these, as indeed every village on the Cape, being famous nurseries of sailors and fishermen. Here is some agriculture, the farms and towns having roomy old houses, and the extensive cranberry bogs showing one of the chief industries of the people. Along the southern shore are Marshpee, Cotuit, and Hyannis, all changing from fishing-ports to modern fashionable watering-places. The surface is composed of sharply defined hills of white sand, having broad sandy levels between that are almost desert plains. There are some trees, but the growth becomes gradually stunted, as the journey is made out upon the Cape, and villages are less frequent and population sparser. Modern cottages crown the hilltops, and the frequent cranberry bogs are as level as a floor, being thickly grown with the myriad runners and sombre foliage of the prolific plant.

Passing Yarmouth and Harwich, the railway turns northward at the elbow of the cape, where Chatham is on the ocean shore. Brewster is northward, and Eastham, noted for its fortified church, whose colonial pastor received by law, for his salary, part of every stranded whale coming upon the shore. To the left is Welfleet, on the bay shore, and to the right the triple lighthouses of Nauset Beach, in front of which the ocean tides divide, moving in opposite directions, one current south to Nantucket Sound, and the other north, to go around the Cape into Massachusetts Bay. Northward is the sandy desert of Truro, the "Dangerfield" of early days, regarded as the most fatal coast in New England. This town of Truro has been described as "a village where its able-bodied men are all ploughing the ocean together as a common field," while in North Truro "the women and girls may sit at their doors and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen to twenty miles off on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest-wagons." Here, upon the high hill making the ocean shore, where the headland curves from north around to the west, is the guardian beacon of Cape Cod, the lofty Highland Light, forty-one miles southeast of Boston Light, and whose powerful white rays shine for twenty miles over the ocean without, and the bay within. The tower stands on a hill one hundred and forty-two feet high, and the light is elevated nearly two hundred feet. Along here Thoreau walked on the "sand-bar in the midst of the sea," and as he gazed far over the ocean, thus reflected: "The nearest beach to us on the east was on the coast of Galicia in Spain, whose capital is Santiago, though by old poets' reckoning it should have been Atlantis, or the Hesperides; but Heaven is found to be farther west now. At first we were abreast of that part of Portugal entre Douro e Mino, and then Galicia and the port of Pontevedro opened to us as we walked along, but we did not enter, the breakers ran so high. The bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of east, jutted toward us next with its vain brag; for we flung back 'Here is Cape Cod, Cape Land's Beginning.' A little indentation toward the north—for the land loomed to our imaginations like a common mirage—we knew was the Bay of Biscay, and we sang, 'There we lay, till next day, in the Bay of Biscay, O!' A little south