said the artist gravely, "did you make that up?"

"No," said Barbara, clutching the seat as we went around the corner on one wheel, "I looked it up."

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. We went careening up the side-road to the Standish house, which was built in 1666, not by the captain himself, but by one of his sons.

It was closed. An old house, locked, with an open field around it and the sea below; a perfect place for sketching, and the rising wind from the sea. Barbara went softly up to the doorway and touched the rusty latch. On one side of the doorstep was a lilac bush, and on the other a wild birch.

The Standish House, Duxbury, (1666)

This is probably the oldest of the gambrel-roofed houses on the harbor. 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.

Thoreau criticizes the Pilgrims for lacking the explorer's instinct. They were not woodsmen, he says, nor, except spiritually, pioneers at heart. He calls attention to the fact that it was long after the landing before they explored the woods and ponds back of Plymouth, territory "within the compass of an afternoon's ramble." "A party of emigrants to California or Oregon," says he, "with no less work on their hands and more hostile Indians, would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree."

Well, the Sieur de Champlain had not with him such little travelers as Oceanus Hopkins and Peregrine White. After the deaths of the first winter, every one of the few grown men left in the colony was needed for immediate affairs. They could not afford to go exploring overmuch. With the exception of the madcap Billingtons and one boy Crackston, they ran very little risk of losing themselves in the woods. They went, as much as possible by sea, to Kennebeck, to Boston, to all parts of Cape Cod. But as to wandering through the woods on foot, that was done only for good and warrantable reasons, not to see what they could see.

Yet even here we find a paradox. They were so thinned in numbers that they had to be cautious, but in an emergency they knew how to be perfectly reckless and perfectly adequate to the occasion. In March, 1623, when news came that their friend Massasoit was "like to die," they knew that, if they were to be accounted loyal friends, they must follow the Indian custom of paying a visit to the chief in his last days. Therefore, Edward Winslow, with one Master John Hampden of London, and the Indian Hobbomock for guide, set out on foot around across the Cape, through what is now Eastham, to Mattapoisett, and thence to "Sowams," now the town of Warren, Rhode Island, the home of Massasoit. In spite of the protests of Hobbomock, part of the journey through the woods was made after nightfall, so eager were they to arrive before "Massassowat" died. And the accurate Winslow records and translates for us a sentence in Massasoit's own language, the very words of the great friendly sachem: "Matta neen wonckanet namen, Winsnow!" that is to say, 'O Winslow, I shall never see thee again.' Winslow tells us how he revived Massasoit by giving him a "confection of comfortable conserves on the point of my knife," and by performing other helpful offices, "which he took marvelous kindly"; and how he then set out on his homeward journey, after learning from the convalescent Massasoit of the plans of other tribes to destroy the paleface colony. On Winslow's return trip through the woods, the Indians themselves, he says, "demanded further how we durst, being but two, come so far into the country. I answered, where was true love, there was no fear."

They did explore. But their exploring was always for community purpose, whether for "true love," or for parleys with the French and Dutch, or for trade with Squanto's friends at Chatham, or for pasturage for their "katle," or for fish.

We do not know how La Salle and De Soto and the Sieur de Champlain would have looked upon the woods around Plymouth and the Cape. They would probably have thought of them as suburbs of the Mississippi. But as we sit on the Standish doorstep and glance out toward Plymouth, with the harbor between us and the Duxbury woods behind, we realize that the first settlers here were quite completely cut off from the shelter of that comely fort on Burial Hill. There was something very hardy and permanent about their pioneering, though there was always a reasonable explanation for the risks they undertook. There were no heroics about it. Their chronicler says simply, "now they must of necessitie goe to their great lots; they could not other wise keep their katle." They did not come over out of restlessness, or for adventure, or primarily for exploring the new continent, at all. Mr. John Alden spoke in the authentic colonial spirit. They came over to settle it—to open it up.

CHAPTER III

WINSLOW'S "GREAT LOT"

From John Alden's land, in early days, a footpath led out along the shore, over Stony Brook, by Duck's Hill, to Careswell, the "great lot" granted to Edward Winslow. The lot is now the town of Marshfield, made famous by Daniel Webster and by generations of notable Winslows.

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. When he went plying back and forth on his diplomatic voyages between Plymouth and England, his duties varied from the responsibility of convoying twenty hogsheads of beaver to the old country and bringing back three heifers and a bull to the new, to defending the judicial policy of his friends in Boston, and writing such sprightly tracts as "Hypocrisie Unmasked" and "New England's Salamander Discovered." Oliver Cromwell appointed him Commissioner to go to Hispaniola and Jamaica, and to confer at Goldsmiths' Hall, London, on a question involving Denmark's seizure of English ships after the treaty of peace. The Commissioners were given a certain time to come to a decision; and if they could not agree by the day appointed, they were to be "shut up in a chamber, without fire, candles, meat, or drink, or any other refreshment, until they should agree." Cromwell believed in international agreements speedily arrived at.

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