But the most nautical of our possessions was the carpet on the floor of our kitchen; a carpet made of an old sail cut square and spread smoothly and painted gray—an old sail with all the wind taken out of it, spread, not this time for Java Head or Lisbon, but for our kitchen floor!
"Now," said our hostess, calling us to the window, "perhaps you can understand why they call this place The Point."
We looked out. The whole ocean was crowding up the valley,—foam and gulls and driftwood and all,—flooding the bed of the Pamet River. The marsh-grass and the bottom-lands, which had been solid ground two hours before, were the floor of the ocean now; the familiar winding channel of the Pamet, with its fish-weirs, eel-traps, and boundaries all submerged.
"Isn't this a sea-going promontory?" inquired our proud freeholder, as we watched a sea-gull flap its way up against the rain, alight on the water, and swim toward our territory over the gusty brine. "This, you see, is high-course tide," our friend went on, with that double vanity that comes from being the possessor of a new estate and a new vocabulary. "But it never makes in beyond this Point. The Indians used to have their wigwam here before the house was built."
Barbara and I instantly adopted for our own permanent possession the sea-going promontory, the gulls and the high tide sailing up around our premises, and the house itself.
"The Ark"
During our sojourn on the Cape, we learned just one thing that we can be sure of: You should never make any general statement whatever about Cape Cod. If you do, you will find your statement disproved by the next turn of the tide, or turn of the road. You mention the fact that Bartholomew Gosnold discovered it in 1602, naming it Cape Cod because there his boat was so "pestered" with codfish. And a well-informed friend will set you right by explaining how the Vikings discovered it some six hundred years earlier. Or perhaps you are interested in weather-vanes. After inspecting them on all the barns down the Cape, you say that all weather-vanes here are codfish; some flat codfish, some solid, but all cod. Instantly you look up and see a beautiful swordfish afloat over the roof of your neighbor's barn. Perhaps you see Barnstable in midwinter, with its marshlands and shores packed with cakes of ice, pink and lavender in the sunset, with sea-gulls sitting upright on the edges, like so many penguins on an Arctic floe. You decide that the Cape harbors are full of ice. But if you inspect the harbor of Provincetown on that same day, you are likely to find not a scrap of ice on the premises.
You might as well confine yourself to particulars, and avoid large sayings of any sort. Thoreau is properly cautious about this. Even when he speaks of so simple a matter as the rarity of dogs and cats on the Atlantic side of the Cape, he guards his speech. "Still less," says he, "could you think of a cat bending her steps that way and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this happens sometimes, they tell me." They told him the truth. 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?" The Cape Cod cats are not confined to doorsteps. They catch the Cape Cod mice. And at least one elegant pure-white cat of our acquaintance goes stepping down the Cape with her master, shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic, perhaps, but waiting until it is time to go back, and then escorting him home.