Frances Lester Warner

“ There is something very strong and homely about the pitch of the roof—a balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with the huge chimney and low walls. A weathered gambrel has a way of looking at home in the fields, a sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Standish house, with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, looks like a very old settler indeed.
For a long time we sat on the doorstep and watched the outline of Plymouth Town across the harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the crows. The son of Standish of Standish knew where to pitch a house. ”

“ It rose up steep as a breaker itself, with a jagged edge at the top where the wind had scooped out sharp hollows at the roots of the beach-grass. We each made straight for one of these hollows, in one last determined dash up the sheer slope. All this time, the noise of tumult had been growing louder and louder, and when we reached the crest, there it was before us, the whole Atlantic ocean rearing toward our frail strip of sandy shore. ”

“ In order to feel the true sense of history,—not a worked-up sentiment, but the real thing,—you have to look at Plymouth, not in panorama but in detail. You have to accept with philosophy such modern phenomena as the Massasoit Shoe-Shine Parlors and the Plymouth Rock Garage, and keep your eyes open for certain types of old houses scattered in unexpected places everywhere.
One of these is a neat old house in excellent repair, the ends of the house of brick, the side toward the street of wood, plain gable roof, stout chimney, the whole thing painted white, and all fascinating within. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We know that we shall not see the original block-house, but we still have a lingering feeling that Plymouth ought to look gray.
And Leyden Street does not. It is old, but not decrepit. A very short street, with close-set houses, some of them painted white or yellow; and at the head of the street, on what used to be Elder Brewster's Meerstead, the fine Post-Office building—it is hard to realize that this is the place where the Mayflower settlers staked off their nineteen plots of ground. Even in winter, there is no sweeping impression that anything very grim or perilous ever happened here. ”

“ The wharves, the monument, the lighthouse, and the sails in the harbor were blurred by the fine flakes that filled the air.
But the snow soon changed to rain, the squall turned into a northeast wind, the wind rose to a gale, and Barbara and I decided to see the Atlantic in a real storm. We went home first for rubber coats, and then set off down the road to the ocean side of the Cape. The wind from the Atlantic goes over the Pamet valley in one great rush of invisible swiftness. As you lean forward against it, you feel that you must run to hold your own. ”

“ The world outside appears like a series of pictures seen through an artist's finder. If your house tops a dune on the narrow part of the Cape, you may see the sails on the horizon of the Atlantic on the east, and the sails on the horizon of the Bay on the west; a clear view of the salt water straight across the Cape in both directions.
As you go down from Barnstable to Provincetown, in automobile or by train, you notice that there are more windows than you expect to see in the triangle under the slope of the roofs. ”

“ Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against the sky. ”

“ Plymouth harbor is a quiet place by moonlight, and Burial Hill is a very quiet place. Yet it gave us the most direct message we had—of spacious thought dramatized in narrow setting, of definite achievement with inadequate equipment, of the resourceful valiance of those early people, and of what Governor Bradford calls "their great patience and allacritie of spirit" in the face of life, and death. ”

“ Whether the house is upside down or not, one thing is certain—that here Miss Lydia Jackson was married to Emerson. Once in a while an event in the world takes place in precisely the perfect setting. Emerson's marriage was one. The huge English door, almost as broad as it is tall, with its great brass knocker and deep paneling, knows how to swing wide open in a stately way of its own; a proper door to welcome Mr. Emerson. And the rooms inside, with their high white paneling and delicate beading around the top, have dignity in every line. In every room there is a fireplace, with tiles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you like to indulge your taste in roofs, you make a different kind for every addition. One section may be gable, another lean-to, and the one-story addition may run out as long as you please, shaped on top something like the roof of a barge. Simply fit your building to the ups and downs of the land and the ways of the wind. A bit of faded blue paint somewhere on the blinds or near the door, and all your roofing weathered by many hundred harbor gales, and your house is nautical.
There are not as many of these in Plymouth as in Gloucester, but there are a few. ”

“ But one impression we do feel strongly. If we stand at the head of the street by Elder Brewster's spring, and look down past the site of the first house, at the blue harbor, and then turn and look up at Burial Hill, we find ourselves thinking of the compactness of it all. ”

“ It is hard to believe that the Mayflower came cruising over the Atlantic through just such winds. "In sundrie of these stormes," says Bradford, "the winds were so feirce & ye seas so high, as they could not beare a knote of sail, but were forced to hull, for diverce days togither." When we think how the sea can growl around an ocean-liner now, and then think how the little Mayflower went hulling for diverce days in "mighty storme," we wonder how it ever got here at all. ”

“ Of course, we did not expect to find flowers, but we thought that we might find a root or two of mayflower from John Alden's land, to transplant on our hill at home. We know that it does grow in Duxbury, but we must have looked in all the wrong places. Like many other great explorers, we found all sorts of things other than the thing we sought: charming patches of checkerberry and mosses; blueberry bushes growing where blueberries ought not to grow and arbutus ought; many pleasant views of Captain Standish's tall monument on the Hill, but not one stiff rusty leaf of a mayflower. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ When you build a nautical house, you should begin more than a hundred years ago with a small cottage on the side-hill over the harbor, and add on a snug cabin now and then, tucking in a shipshape companionway here and there, and running a new section out along the slope. ”

“ But doubtless the oldest Duxbury settlers were the clams. The colonists called them, first, "sandgapers," then clamps, then clambs, clambes, slammes, and clammes. We surmise that the clam was not at first the Pilgrims' favorite dish, when we read Mr. John Pory's account of his visit to Plymouth in 1622. "Muskles and slammes they have all the yeare long, which being the meanest of God's blessings here, and such as these people fat their hogs with at low water, if ours upon any extremitie did enjoy in the South Colonie, they would never complain of famine or want, although they wanted bread." ”

“ It is very fitting that this house, on the land of the most internationally minded man of the early colony, should be cordial to visitors now. Old houses make friends easily. They are like people who have known our grandfathers—able on that account to make us feel at home. And when an ancient house bears the name of one of the Pilgrim Forefathers, it plays homestead to the whole United States.
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. ”

“ Other houses that were built in the sixteen hundreds, especially the Holmes House, also repay the trouble of searching them out. And when we find them, they look as if they had been built in the spirit of Governor Bradford's specifications about the colony's purpose in founding the Plymouth Plantation: "Not out of any newfanglednes or other such like giddie humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt and danger, but for sundrie weightie & solid reasons." ”

“ The Pilgrim Winslow was Plymouth's favorite representative in foreign affairs, whether in dealings with the Dutch, or with the Indians, or with the English in London. His friendships were curiously varied and fortunate; he was admired and trusted by such forceful men as Roger Williams, Massasoit, and Oliver Cromwell—a vigorous trio. ”

“ Because of this inconvenience of our "entry," we always expect callers to come in at the door of our kitchen—our porch. For the benefit of the uninstructed it may be well to say that when we speak of our "porch" on our part of the Cape, we mean the same thing as an ell. Our porch is an ell with an attic over it, a kitchen chimney, our stove, and our pump and major equipment for the industries of the day. It opens into the "winter kitchen," where they did their fireplace cooking years ago, before there was a stove in the porch. ”

“ On Winslow's land to-day stands the Winslow house, built on the old foundation by Isaac Winslow in 1699. This famous homestead, which a few years ago was going to wrack and ruin through sheer old age, has been restored as nearly as possible to its original state of comfort and dignity by the Winslow Associates, furnished throughout with a rare collection of antique furniture, and opened to the many visitors who come that way on their route to Plymouth. As you wander through the rooms, you find the place a perfect study in early building ”

“ In large families, in the early days, some of the children had to sleep out in these open chambers, under the slope of the roof. There is at least one noted man of affairs in the United States to-day who affirms that there is one rafter in the open chamber of a certain house on Cape Cod that has a slight but clearly defined hollow worn in it, where he used to collide with the roof when he got aboard his trundle-bed in the dark.
Old Fish Wharf, Cape Cod
The Double House is different ”

“ We erect our monuments to those who, with discouragement and danger and threatened shipwreck all around them, valiantly prop up their beam, calk their decks, commit themselves to the will of God—and "resolve to proseede." ”

“ Some authorities say that the Cape cellars were made circular to prevent the heavy sand from breaking through by undue pressure on any one wall, as would happen in a four-cornered cellar. Others imagine that seafaring men made their cellars circular on the principle of the half-barrel in the sand. ”

“ If we remember our own schooldays, we know that the story of a punishment can take a fabulous turn in less than two hundred years. But from her epitaph on Burial Hill, we may be fairly sure that her relations with the public were not without an occasional breeze. ”

“ We found out later that it was a net-float—a glass buoy to bob on top of the waves, holding up a corner of the net at sea. You find them sometimes on the beach after a storm. An old glass net-float dry-docked under the hood of a cradle—we put it back where we found it. ”

“ Ours is very neatly made of matched planks, with one part at the end cleverly arranged to slide, so that you can draw out the planks a little and get down into the manhole that incloses the pipes from pump to drilled well. On cold winter nights, you let yourself down on the ladder twelve feet underground, to turn off the water in the pump, if you are afraid that the pipes are going to freeze. ”