CAPE COD, you must know, gentle reader, is my bleak native home, and the birth-place of all the most celebrated critics. The latter fact is not generally known, and for the reason that the gentry composing that fraternity acknowledge her only with an excess of reluctance. Her poets and historians never mention her in their famous works; her blushing maidens never sing to her, and her novelists lay the scenes of their romances in other lands. One solitary poet was caught and punished for singing a song to her sands; but of her codfish no historian has written, though divers malicious writers have declared them the medium upon which one of our aristocracies is founded. But I love her none the less for this.