

First comes a dark-stained saltbox with a long sloping roof - the Hoxie House (about 1670) reputed to be the Cape's oldest - then a gray-shingled, white-trimmed Colonial house almost at the water's edge. Next is Dexter's Grist Mill (built 1690, rebuilt 1961), still grinding corn, and across the street, the classic white First Church of Christ with its slim, airy spire.

If you approach the Colonial house on the pond, you will be greeted by a signboard saying Thornton W. Burgess Museum and decorated with a white rabbit wearing patched blue overalls and carrying a walking stick, strolling down a shady lane. This Tom Sawyer of the animal world and the name of his originator strike a chord for innumerable Americans who grew up before 1960. In his day, Thornton W. Burgess - creator of the American version of Peter Rabbit and his animal friends in the Dear Old Briar Patch, the Smiling Pool, the Green Meadow and the Laughing Brook - was one of the world's best-selling and best-loved authors. Frankly inspired by the tremendous popularity of Beatrix Potter's animal stories (her ''Tale of Peter Rabbit'' first appeared in 1900), Burgess's tales painted an idealized version of the country childhoods so many of his readers had left behind. An edge of genuine danger often tinged Potter's plots. But in the enchanted precincts of Burgess's Briar Patch, Farmer Brown's gun always missed its mark and a predator like Reddy Fox played with his quarry rather like a mischievous boy.

All these places immortalized by Burgess (1874-1965) evoked the landscape of his Sandwich youth, which an interested visitor can trace and enjoy thanks to the conservation and preservation efforts of the citizens of Sandwich. Like many enterprising youths of his time and place, Burgess left his hometown at age 18, he for Boston and then Springfield, where he soon rose from office boy to editor and reporter at the Phelps Publishing Company, then owner of Good Housekeeping. But he always felt that his stories were ''truly a Sandwich product. . . for am I not a Sandwich product?''

In 1974, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the people of Sandwich repaid his allegiance by founding the museum containing the largest existing collection of his works and memorabilia. In 1976 came the Thornton Burgess Society, which runs the museum, a nature center and a jam kitchen. Its purpose, quoting his words, was ''to inspire reverence for wildlife and concern for the natural environment.''

The wide lawn to the right of the museum's entrance - part of a Sandwich public park - is populated by grazing Canada geese, and in one corner a characteristic briar patch. To the left of the house a white post and rail fence encloses an herb garden. Known as the tussie-mussie garden, the 50-foot circular planting was designed in the shape of the 19th-century nosegay of herbs and flowers tied with a ribbon.

The permanent display in the the museum is devoted to Burgess's life and work. An annual exhibition concentrates on one aspect of it; this year's exhibition, growing out of his work as a pioneer conservationist, is ''The Changing Landscape of Cape Cod.''

Born into an isolated rural community in 1874, before the railroad had reached Sandwich, Burgess lived well into the days of what he described in his autobiography as ''too much, too fast, too soon.''

Yet he proved adept at using the techniques of the new age - mass-circulation newspapers and books and including the radio - to reach millions of children and their parents. Inspired by early-20th-century conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt, he encouraged his readers and listeners to join in the movement to protect endangered wildlife and the environment. For example, his stories of ''The Adventures of Mrs. Quack,'' including ''Mrs. Quack and the Terrible, Terrible Guns'' helped to bring about passage of the first Migratory Waterfowl Act in 1916.

Photographs convey the atmosphere of Victorian Sandwich where Burgess, fatherless at nine months, early picked cranberries, herded cows and delivered milk, while living in a series of 10 houses belonging to an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins. In his rare free time he roamed the woods and fields nearby, gaining that knowledge and appreciation of nature that would give his stories their sturdy foundation of fact.

He never lived in the house now occupied by the museum, but its former owner, Arabella Burgess (1843-1931), one of his aunts, may have influenced him. A small-town eccentric and amateur naturalist, she walked about town talking to the pet hen she usually carried.

In 1910 Burgess began the transition from successful editor to full-time writer with the publication of probably his most famous book, ''Old Mother West Wind'' made up of bedtime stories he told his 4-year-old son. Many of the animal characters who would later populate Burgess's works made their debut in this book, among them Peter Rabbit; his son insisted a rabbit had to be called Peter in honor of Beatrix Potter's best-known animal hero. Like Potter, Burgess knew how to mix education with entertainment. His animals wear clothes and speak - he believed the ''colorful child mind'' needed the spice to remember the facts. But the characters are true to nature; Jimmy Skunk eats beetles, Johnny Chuck, eats clover, and Little Joe Otter catches fish.