more cod and mackerel fishermen sail to the banks than ever before the vessels no longer hail from the Cape, nor do scarcely any of the fishermen. Along the south side of the Cape thirty years ago great wharves stretched far to seaward over the sandy shoals, a hundred sail of fishing vessels might have been seen in the offing, and a thousand men sailed from Dennisport, Chatham, and other towns alongside. Now only the ro'ting piles show here and there where these costly wharves stood, and for a good part of the year the little towns, grown gray and sleepy, slumber and dream of past glories. In 1895 Provincetown still registered forty-seven fishing vessels, the rest of Barnstable County but seventeen. To-day but three or four hail from Provincetown, while from the other ports hardly a single vessel sails to the banks. Massachusetts has a great fleet of fishermen, the finest vessels in the world, but the Cape owns and sails them

no more.

They hail from Boston or Gloucester and are manned in the main by men from the British Provinces. So far as the Cape is concerned the eclipse is almost

total.

The old family names still stand by in the districts that they once made populous. The Kelleys are prevalent in one part of the Cape, the Nickersons in another, while the Nyes hold their ancient habitat, not of course to the exclusion of all other names, but they prevail. In many instances the final appellation seems to be understood. John I. Nickerson will be known to everybody as John I. If you hear a man spoken of as 'Miah Doane, you need not believe that Doane is his last

name.

It probably is only his middle one. But nobody on the Cape would know Nehemiah D. Kelley if you spoke of him that way. 'Miah Doane it is by common consent and always will be. But John I. and 'Miah Doane no longer sail the seas. John I. runs a livery stable and a notion store, both for the exploitation of summer visitors, and 'Miah Doane may own a cranberry bog, but the chances are he makes his living by keeping the summer boarders who ride behind John I.'s horse, or else he has divided up the ancestral acres into little houselots on which the summer visitors build cottages. In fact in a long trip. from the wrist of the right arm of Massachusetts down to below its elbow the chief signs of business. or prosperity are in the communities where the summer visitor is prevalent.

Of the old-time industries one at least has increased and is profitable to the people. That is the raising of cranberries. Hardly a year goes by but you hear of a big, new bog being put into condition and during September and October everybody on the Cape earns good money by picking cranberries. Yet not all bogs are prosperous, the best being the most expensive, and these in very many instances are owned and exploited by outside capital. "

In the town of Eastham some years ago a man set out quite a field of asparagus. The soil of the Cape, at least in this vicinity, seems peculiarly adapted to this vegetable and the field was so successful that its owner enlarged it. Others in the neighborhood were inspired by his success to do likewise and now there is a large acreage in many parts of the town and many people have

found prosperity in their sandy fields which were considered as of little worth. In fact you can buy land in this portion of the Cape still for two dollars an acre, and from surface indications one might well be sorry to pay that for much of it. Yet the town which had been going down is now on a little wave of prosperity. One man reports that from his asparagus field last year, with only one man to help him in his work he cleared two thousand dollars. Not bad for sandy barrens where the grass has often a hard fight for existence and yields the ground to "poverty moss" which will grow where nothing else can. but for which no man has yet found

a use.

Yet the chief business of Cape Cod to-day is not whaling or fishing, or any other of the old-time industries which brought prosperity. It is entertaining summer visitors. These come in greater numbers every year, stay longer, leave more money behind them, and go away better satisfied than ever. All the way down to the very tip you will find the fine houses of wealthy owners who spend the summer months there, the less pretentious cottages of less pretentious visitors, and hotels, many of them quite palatial, at almost every vantage point. Better than this, there is an income for two or three months of the year for almost anyone who is willing to take boarders at a fair price, and in all these ways prosperity is coming back to the Cape. It is not so good a prosperity as that of the old-time days when the Cape sailors were the great men of all seas, either for the people of the Cape or for the nation at large, but it is of a kind that comes in these

modern days, and it is not to be taken lightly. Already sandy strips on the seashore, that were formerly held as not worth taxes, bring good prices to cut up into cottage lots and points of special sightliness and convenience bring especially good money. Even in the Truros, which certainly are the jumping off place, cottages spring up, forming little communities where only a few years ago was barrenness and seemingly utter desolation. Few things will grow in this barren soil along the narrow wrist of the Cape, yet cottages seem to, and prosperity for the all the year round Cape dwellers may blossom from these.

This then seems to be the future which opens before the Cape, to be the pleasure ground for prosperous people who live in cities and are willing to pay for free winds, ozone and good bathing from sandy spits far out in the very realm of Neptune. The Cape Codders are Yankees and already realize this and begin to cater to it extensively. The state roads are penetrating the sand abysses where formerly wheels sank deep and and horses ploughed laboriously. These roads bring the automobiles and in them come people who spend money freely and are glad to do so. The Cape landscape has a subtle charm which makes the visitor want to see it again and again, and such always return to these quaint towns and sandy ports. It is not an ignoble condition which promises for the future of the right arm of Massachusetts, but it is a far different one from that which made it famous in the centuries gone, and one can but regret the sturdy, skilful seamen who once swarmed from its shores.

An Unregenerate GraveDigger

Jo

By GERTRUDE ROBINSON

OE RICH was digging a grave in the old cemetery. It wasn't often that the old man had a chance to dig one. Most people went over to Wood Lawn or to St. Mary's; so he took a great deal of pains, making a nice, deep, wellsquared cavity and piling the dirt up neatly to one side. It was hard work for Joe. His blue overallclad form swayed with every shovelful of soil and threatened to pitch into the grave. The perspiration stood out on his weather-scarred face although it was a cool day; and his knotted old hands took to shaking so that half of each shovelful fell off before it was safely landed. But old Joe would not have given up before that grave was finished if it had required his last breath. He was living over again the days when he and the cemetery had been young. People then called it the best tended cemetery in the county. Joe had been kept rather busy digging graves in those days. This taste of that active life made his thin blood go leaping again in his veins. At last Joe straightened up

and looked at the completed grave. "It is the prettiest one I ever dug," he thought proudly. His musings were interrupted by a shrill voice:

"Joe Rich, Joe Rich, ain't you got that grave dug yet? I want you to dig the greens for market

now."

Joe Rich shouldered his shovel and pike, cast one last admiring glance at the completed grave and meekly ambled away in the direction of his cottage, whence the voice issued.

This cottage, across the road from the cemetery, was the one perquisite of Joe's office as town gravedigger. He was as proud of it as of his position. The path to the front door was gorgeous with its flanking of round, white-washed stones. Beyond these, on either side, were rows of stiff dahlias, many-colored asters, flaunting geraniums, and on the outskirts, a medley of towering sunflowers and drooping hollyhocks.

Mrs. Joe Rich stood in the doorway. Her stately figure reminded one of a mis-proportioned elephant and was strangely at variance with the guinea-hen quality of her voice. Just now her strident tones fell on deaf ears. Joe Rich was too full of plans for the afternoon to be sensitive.

He took the two tin water-pails and the short-handled knife, which constituted the green-digging outfit, and ambled away to the meadows back of the house, where it was his daily duty, in the spring, to gather the dandelions which his energetic spouse sold in the village. The gathering was not so bad; the bright sunshine was grateful to his rheumatic joints, but the after process of cleaning the greens was one painful to contemplate, not only on account of the weariness of the task but also because of the humiliating results of Mrs. Joe's sharp-eyed inspection of his work. She inevitably ended by saying:

"If you'd get you a pair of them twenty-five cent spectacles down to the store, you could see to spy out them weeds and leaves." And since Joe's good old eyes were the pride of his life, the mention of spectacles was obnoxious to him. He would as soon have thought of himself as bed-ridden, as bespectacled. But to-day there was a deeper source of discontent. If it had been long since Joe Rich had had a chance to dig a grave, it was still longer since. the delight of attending a funeral had been his. It is true that Mrs. Joe generally patronized such functions; but an inconvenient theory of hers that someone must stay at home to tend the house, had, for some time heretofore, kept her husband an unwilling but obedient. prisoner. However, Joe Rich had no intention of being kept away from the cemetery to-day. He felt he might never dig another grave and he wanted to get the utmost satisfaction out of what he considered his masterpiece.

"It is a right pretty one," he murmured determinedly, as he hauled

up a reluctant dandelion by the roots (a method characterized by Mrs. Joe as "sinful wasteful"), "an' I'm goin' to see it put to the use God and I meant it for. Who knows but that they might let me help fill it up after the service!" It was long since Joe's trembling old hands had performed this office.

As Joe Rich went on planning how to elude Mrs. Joe's watchfulness, get on his best suit of army blue, and exchange the afternoon of drudgery cleaning greens for the rare exhilaration of a funeral, the pile of dandelions grew slowly. When the twelve o'clock quarry whistle sounded, Joe looked down ruefully at his collection of grasses, roots and greens.

"It won't take long to clean 'em, no-way," he chuckled finally.

After dinner Joe Rich cheerfully announced that he was going to lie down "a spell." Since Mrs. Joe made no objection, he scuttled away with alacrity to his room under the eaves. It was hard work to lie still, even fifteen minutes; but he realized the necessity of appearing to sleep until Mrs. Joe became so absorbed in arraying herself in her Sunday best, which she kept in a clothespress opening off the livingroom, that a little noise overhead might pass unnoticed. Mrs. Joe was going to attend the "funeral doings" at the house as well as at the cemetery. Once assured that she was thus intently employed, Joe crept out of bed, unlocked the chest in the corner, took out his army suit and slipped into it. The feeling of the familiar garments recalled to him some of the pride of manhood he felt when he went marching away in them.

"She don't need to be so stuck up