Yes, a picnic discloses the strength and weakness of character which mark our friends, and yet, after all, it does more, for it brings out the best in most of us, and few, even of our habitually conventional friends, fail to respond to the delights of a seashore picnic or lack in the essential philosophy of an outdoor, care-free existence.
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MODELS
Long before the Old Colony Railroad thought of running a line to Cape Cod—although that in itself was not so very long ago, well within the memory of man—there was one charm of the Cape which is fast vanishing and entirely unknown to the casual visitor and unappreciated by the perennial summer residents. In those days there was a host of rugged, sturdy men, intelligent, courageous, upright, and keen-minded. They were the Cape captains, the men who grew up among the sand-dunes, to the rote of the sea. The men who carried the good name of Cape Cod to the ends of the earth and who brought back with them the fortunes which made the little towns, dotted here and there along the shore, havens of comfort and rest.
Such men could tell stories which would vie with those of Conrad and Stevenson, but for the most part their deeds go unrecorded except in their ships’ logs, for they were a simple, reserved company. Of this epoch there remains but one relic which is sought after by the present generation, and it savors of the antique. In fact, it is the antiquarian rather than the adventurer who ransacks the Cape at present for ships’ models.
In those early days there were months at a time when the ship’s company were idle, and it grew to be a custom for those clever with their hands to fashion models of the schooners in which they sailed or of seacraft notable for beauty of line or complexity of rig.
Many an old sea captain would pass his idle moments in fashioning these miniature boats, and many members of the ships’ crews became adept at the hobby, for a knowledge of tools was almost an essential for every man on the Cape, where the trades of carpenter, painter, and plumber were generally performed by the householder. Furthermore, a sailor would infinitely prefer to whittle out a model than to swab down the deck, and frequently a clever mechanic would be relieved by his captain from this menial work, if he devoted his time to the perfection of a model which was destined for the mantel of the captain’s best parlor.
Therefore, in the old days, there was scarcely a Cape family of saltwater ancestry which did not boast of at least one model and often more, the trademark of an honorable and hazardous occupation and a relic of former days of plenty when the Cape was peopled only by the native Cape-Codders and before steam took from them the vocation to which they were reared.