Cape Cod Folks. Sarah Pratt McLean Greene

CHAPTER I.

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ON A MISSION.

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      "Lo, on a narrer neck o' land,

       'Twixt two unbounded seas, I stand!"

      Aunt Sibylla was not sporting, now, in the airy realms of metaphor. Aunt Sibylla stood upon Cape Cod, and her voice rang out with that peculiar sweep and power which the presence of a dread reality alone can give. Something of the precariousness of her situation, too, was expressed in The wild, alarming, though graceful, gesture of her arms.

      It was before the long-projected canal separating Cape Cod from the mainland had been put under active process of preparation.

      It was at an evening meeting in the Wallencamp school-house. A row of dingy, smoking lanterns had been set against the wall and afforded the only light cast upon the scene. Aunt Sibylla Cradlebow, the speaker, was tall and dark-eyed, with an almost superhuman litheness of body, and a weird, beautiful face.

      "And, oh, my dear brothers and sisters and onconvarted friends!" she continued; "how little do we realize the reskiness of our situwation here on the Cape! Here we stand