Cape Cod Folks

Grandpa, too, pined and put away his food. He used to look across the table at me, with a feeble appeal for sympathy in his expression. Oftentimes he sighed deeply, and related...

I studied Becky Weir in school, the next day, with special interest. She was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, with the stately, substantial presence of one of nature's own godde...

At least, that celestial orb had long forgotten all the roseate flaming of his youth, in an honest, straightforward march through the heavens, ere the first signs of smoke came...

Aunt Sibylla was not sporting, now, in the airy realms of metaphor. Aunt Sibylla stood upon Cape Cod, and her voice rang out with that peculiar sweep and power which the presenc...

"Teacher's got Beck's beau!" I heard it whispered among the school children. Rebecca heard, too, and paled a little, but looked up at me and smiled as frankly as ever.

"We have our r'al, good, comfortin' meal at night," Grandma Keeler had said, and the thought was uppermost in my mind at the close of my first day's labor in Wallencamp. I had t...

Up from the beach, lightly tripping, capacious reticule in hand, came Mrs. Barlow to spend the day at the Ark, unexpectedly! The inspired and felicitous customs of the Wallencam...

Emily, by the way, was regarded as a hopeful subject of the "awakenin'." She had been to see a doctor in Farmouth, who told her she could not live through another winter "with t...

Morning dawned on my mission to Wallencamp. My wakening was not an Enthusiastic one. Slowly my bewildered vision became fixed on an object on the wall opposite, as the least fan...

One morning, ere we had breakfasted at the Ark, Lovell Barlow, like some new-fangled orb of day, was seen to surmount the ruddy verge of the horizon. He bore a gun upon his shou...

One day, I set myself with a sort of listless fidelity to the summing up of my accounts. I found, on deducting the amount of my actual expenses from the sum total of my earnings...

The Wallencamp bonfire, like Christmas or a Fourth of July celebration in less ingenious and erratic communities, came only once a year. It was kindled on Eagle Hill, that runs...

It was night, and one was going out from among them to launch his lonely bark on a deeper, more mysterious ocean than that whose moan came up to them from behind the cedars. The...

There were oppressive days in Wallencamp, when no fresh winds were borne to us from the ocean. The sun shone hot on the stunted cedars. The tides crept in lazily. All one weary...

The ship in which the Cradlebow expected to take flight was to sail from New Bedford on the twentieth of June. Meantime, having abjured my friendly relations with Rebecca, and m...

The fisherman had gone back to Providence. Rebecca, herself, returning from the Post Office at West Wallen, brought me a letter distinguished by its peculiar dashing chirography...

"It's be'n a mild winter on the Cape;" the Wallencampers congratulated one another, blinking, with a delicious sense of warmth and comfort, in the rays of a strong March sun.

Mrs. Philander Keeler grew kind. At first, especially while the fisherman was in Wallencamp, her demeanor towards me had been marked by a decided touch of coldness and mistrust....

It was George Olver who spoke, in his sturdy, resolute bass. The words hardly took on the form of a suave request: they were uttered in too earnest, grave, and intent a tone.

One morning, early in my convalescence, I was startled by a mighty rumbling and scraping sound on the narrow stairway, as of some unwieldy object pushed steadily upward. The sum...

They gathered at the Ark. No other place seemed to them sacred enough for such a meeting, now; no other place dear enough for the celebration of such a solemn, long farewell.