t is passed at Wakeby and the blue waters of a great
lake lap in crystal clearness on the clean sands. The Cape sands
are a vast water filter and strain out of the streams all
sediment. The ponds are liquid crystals in narrow settings of pale
gold.

Someone told me it was only eight miles across the Cape from East
Sandwich to Cotuit. Perhaps it is as the crow flies, but I could
not clear the scrub as they do and I found the roads adapted to
delightful leisure. No wonder the Cape folk do not hurry. How
could they? The narrow, gray ribbon of road strolled with me
through what seemed eight miles of forest before we reached
Wakeby.

Somewhere along there the holly stood green and statuesque in
occasional clumps. And thus we fared on to Mashpee. The Mashpees,
very mild and genial descendants of the "Chawums," if descendants
they are, live quietly in little yellow houses that do not look
prosperous, though the children are fat and the elders contented.
Modern civilization has reached them in phonographs, bicycles and
folding baby-carriages, if the shingles are vanishing from the
roof. In 1620 Mashpee was their chief and they lived in wigwams.
But the last pure blood died in 1804. Nauhaut, one of the deacons
of the Cape Indian church, which seems to have thrived a century
or two ago, was the hero of a wonderous snake story which, if it
were not about a deacon, one might think apocryphal. I did not see
a black snake on the whole journey, but they are common enough
even now and were once perhaps much more so. At any rate Nauhaut
was attacked by a whole ring of them--so the story runs--which
approached him from all sides, the snakes with black heads
raised and hissing venomously. Nauhaut with true Indian strategy
stool still as they approached, and even when the largest of them
twined about his legs and climbed to his neck he made no move
other than to open his mouth wide. The chieftain snake thrust his
head into this mouth with its glistening white teeth, and Nauhaut
immediately bit the head off. Thereupon panic fear seized the
other snakes and they fled, leaving the deacon master of the
battleground. The Cape grows some big black snakes to this day,
but none like those, nor have any later stories appeared to match.

The Cape has informative guide boards, though whether the facts
match the information I am not quite so sure. Perhaps, sailor-like,
I was circumnavigating Cotuit, beating in, as one might say,
instead of saili