faith," and where the historian wrote _Hudsonia tomentosa_ the
antipathetic compositor set up _Hudsonia tormentosa_. That compositor
was a Cape Cod man,--I would wager a dinner upon it. "Thus the whirligig
of time brings in his revenges," I hear him mutter, as he slips the
superfluous consonant into its place.

This aged cultivator, not so much "on his last legs" as beyond them, was
evidently a native of the soil, but several of the few houses standing
along the valley road were occupied by Western Islanders. I was crossing
a field belonging to one of them when the owner greeted me; a milkman,
as it turned out, proud of his cows and of his boy, his only child. "How
old do you think he is?" he asked, pointing to the young fellow. It
would have been inexcusable to disappoint his fatherly expectations, and
I guessed accordingly: "Seventeen or eighteen." "Sixteen," he
rejoined,--"sixteen!" and his face shone till I wished I had set the
figure a little higher. The additional years would have cost me nothing,
and there is no telling how much happiness they might have conferred.
"Who lives there?" I inquired, turning to a large and well-kept house in
the direction of the bay. "My nephew." "Did he come over when you did?"
"No, I sent for him." He himself left the Azores as a cabin boy, landed
here on Cape Cod, and settled down. Since then he had been to
California, where he worked in the mines. "Ah! that was where you got
rich, was it?" said I. "Rich!"--this in a tone of sarcasm. But he added,
"Well, I made something." His praise of his nearest neighbor--whose
name proclaimed his Cape Cod nativity--made me think well not only of
his neighbor, but of him. There were forty-two Portuguese families in
Truro, he said. "There are more than that in Provincetown?" I suggested.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, about half the people." And pretty good
people they are, if such as I saw were fair representatives. One boy of
fourteen (unlike the milkman's heir, he was very small for his years, as
he told me with engaging simplicity) walked by my side for a mile or
two, and quite won my heart. A true Nathanael he seemed, in whom was no
guile. He should never go to sea, he said; nor was he ever going to get
married so long as his father lived. He loved his father so much, and he
was the only boy, and his father couldn't spare him. "But didn't your
father go to sea?" "Oh, yes; both my fathers went to sea." That was a
puzzle; but presently it cam