The soil in which she coaxed to cheerful bloom old maid's pinks, bachelor buttons, ladies' slippers, marigolds and a dozen other old-fashioned flowers, was brought from a distance. The boisterous autumn winds always drifted over the beds with sand; yet each spring Miss Heppy, like nature herself, made all things new again.
"I vum!" said her brother in his good-natured, if critical way, "I don't see why you do it. All you have to begin on every year is the conch-shells and white pebbles for borders. Sea sand mixed with its loam in such quantity would ha' sp'iled the Garden of Eden for any agricultooral purposes."
"This ain't no Garden of Eden, I do allow," his sister said. "Wherever them scientific fellers undertake to locate what was mankind's first home, they never say 'twas here on the Cape."
"Oh, sugar!" chuckled Tobias. "It took them frozen-faced Puritan ancestors of our'n to choose the Cape to locate on an' set the Provincetown folks and the Plymouth folks a-fightin' over which town should be celebrated in song an' story as the real landin' place of the Pilgrim Fathers."
"Humph!" sniffed Hephzibah, "we hear enough about the Pilgrim Fathers. I cal'late if it hadn't been for the Pilgrim Mothers there wouldn't have been any settlement here a-tall."
"Ye-as," agreed Tobias, pursing his lips. "But the women didn't have the vote then, so they didn't get advertised none to speak of. Of course, there was Priscilla Alden—she that was a Mullens. Longfeller advertised her a good bit. She's the only woman among the Pilgrims that we hear much about. I cal'late 'twas because she was one that knowed her own mind."
"No," said his sister, whose habit of looking at the darker side of life could not be denied. "No. The first woman the history of them times tells about was drowned off the Mayflower as she lay in Provincetown Harbor."
"Oh, sugar! That's so," chuckled Tobias. "She was crowded overboard by the deckload of furniture the packet carried. I never did understand how such a small craft could have brought across all that household stuff folks claim was in her cargo."
But Miss Heppy's reflections were not to be turned by frivolity.
"She," the spinster said, with a sigh, "was the first of us Cape Cod women to suffer from the savage sea."