By Charles O. Stickney, from the July 12, 1890 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript, selected and edited by Kaimi Rose Lum
The daylight of one of the loveliest of summer days had faded into night, as the Old Colony train, on which I was a passenger, passed from the quiet, sleepy town of Sandwich and fully entered upon the sand-covered, sea-girt region of Cape Cod….
There is much cod brought to the Cape, to be sure, but the Cape is not all cod,… it is all sand. Would you believe it? But in some places the sand extends downward three hundred feet; and stones and gravel are almost entirely unknown. Everybody has heard of the Cape, has seen on the map its queer, ram’s-horn-shaped contour, and knows something of its topography; how the Cape proper extends eastward from Sandwich thirty-five miles, thence north and northwest thirty miles more, coming to a point and end in Provincetown — that much-talked-of, much-visited, curious, quaint, interesting, enigmatical, in some respects indescribable, land by the sea, 119 miles, as the horn curves, from the hub of the universe.
As we journeyed on, the full moon rose high in the heavens, causing the weird-like view on either hand to be “in the mists of enchantment arrayed” — a series of swiftly dissolving views of subdued and romantic beauty. Now we caught a glimpse of an arm of the sea; then of some small river; a quiet inland lake; and anon, as we neared the lower end of the Cape, a majestic view of old ocean itself, over which the unclouded moon threw a pathway of silver; while here and there the rays of a distant lighthouse on either side of our way, and the frequent lights of snug white cottages standing trim and cosy on or nestled beside the low, grass-covered hills, or the more pretentious dwelling of some well-to-do citizen, gave an air of animation to an otherwise seeming solitude.
The bending stretch of sand grows more and more narrow, until now the water dashes almost up to the rails. Highland and Long Point lights and passed; on a little farther and we roll up to a handsome depot, where, although the hour is late — it is nearly ten — a crowd is in waiting, either out of curiosity or to welcome expected friends, and our attentive conductor duly assures us that our goal is reached by shouting the talismanic word —
“Provincetown! Provincetown!”
We were still denizens of this mundane sphere, and yet we were in another planet! As I have said, there is no place on this wide earth precisely like Provincetown. So I had thought on many a previous vacation of wanderings and loiterings in this odd land by the sea. So I believed in my latest visit; so I believe and know to this hour. It is a mine for study, and the more you study it the deeper it grows.
