belongings before, even to the "antiquers," and wouldn't have done so now, had it not been that the captain's offer was too princely to be real, and the old lady feared she might be dreaming and would wake up before she received the money. And from Trumet to Ostable he journeyed, buying a chair here and a table there, braided rag mats from this one, and corded bedsteads and "rising sun" quilts from that. At least half of Bayport believed with Gabe Lumley and Miss Phinney that, if Captain Cy had not escaped from a home for the insane, he was a likely candidate for such an institution.

At the table of the perfect boarding house the captain was not inclined to be communicative regarding his reasons and his intentions. He was a prime favorite there, praising Keturah's cooking, joking with Angeline concerning what he was pleased to call her "giddy" manner of dressing and wearing "side curls," and telling yarns of South American dress and behavior, which would probably have shocked Mrs. Tripp--she having recently left the Methodist church to join the "Come-Outers," because the Sunday services of the former were, with the organ and a paid choir, altogether "too play-actin'"--if they had not been so interesting, and if Captain Cy had not always concluded them with the observation: "But there! you can't expect nothin' more from ignorant critters denied the privileges of congregational singin' and experience meetin's; hey, Matilda?"

Mrs. Tripp would sigh and admit that she supposed not.

"Only I do wish Mr. Daniels, OUR minister, might have a chance to preach over 'em, poor things!"

"So do I," with a covert wink at Mrs. Bangs, who was a stanch adherent of the regular faith. "South America 'd be just the place for him; ain't that so, Keturah?"

He evaded all personal questions put to him by the boarders, explaining that he was renovating the old place just for fun--he always had had a gang of men working for him, and it seemed natural somehow. But to the friends of his boyhood, Asaph Tidditt and Bailey Bangs, he told the real truth.

"I swan to man!" exclaimed Bailey, almost tearfully, as the trio wandered through the rooms of the Cy Whittaker place, dodging paper hangers and plasterers; "I swan to man, Whit, if it don't almost seem as though I was a boy again. Why! it's your dad's house come back alive, it is so! Look at this settin' room! Seem's if I could see him now a-settin' by that ere stove, and Mrs. Whittaker, your ma, over there a-sewin', and old Cap'n Cy--your granddad-- snoozin' in that big armchair-- Why! why, whit! it's the very image of the chair he always set in!"

Captain Cy laughed aloud.

"It's more n' that, Bailey," he said; "it's THE chair. 'Twas up attic, all busted and crippled, but I had it made over like new. And there's granddad's picture, lookin' just as I remember him-- only he wan't quite so much of a frozen wax image as he's painted there. I'm goin' to hang it where it always hung, over the mantelpiece, next to the lookin' glass.

"Great land of love, boys!" he went on, "you fellers don't know what this means to me. Many and many's the time I've had this old house and this old room in my mind. I've seen 'em aboard ship in a howlin' gale off the Horn. I've seen 'em down in Surinam of a hot night, when there wan't a breath scurcely and the Caribs went around dressed in a handkerchief and a paper cigar, and it made you wish you could. I've seen 'em--but there! every time I've seen 'em I've swore that some day I'd come back and LIVE 'em, and now, by the big dipper! here I am. Oh, I tell you, chummies, you want to be fired OUT of a home and out of a town to appreciate 'em! Not that I blame the old man; he and I was too much alike to cruise in company. But Bayport I was born in, and in the Bayport graveyard they can plant me when I'm ready for the scrap heap. It's in the blood and-- Why, see here! Don't I TALK like a Bayporter?"

"You sartin do!" replied Asaph emphatically.

"A body 'd think you'd been diggin' clams and pickin' cranberries in Bassett's Holler all your life long, to hear you."

"You bet! Well, that's pride; that's what that is. I prided myself on hangin' to the Bayport twang through thick and thin. Among all the Spanish 'Carambas' and 'Madre de Dioses' it did me good to come out with a good old Yankee 'darn' once in a while. Kept me feelin' like a white man. Oh, I'm a Whittaker! _I_ know it. And I've got all the Whittaker pig-headedness, I guess. And because the old man--bless his heart, I say now--told me I shouldn't BE a Whittaker no more, nor live like a Whittaker, I simply swore up and down I would be one and come back here, when I'd made my pile, to heave anchor and stay one till I die. Maybe that's foolishness, but it's me."

He puffed vigorously at the pipe which had taken the place of the Snowflake cigar, and added:

"Take this old settin' room--why, here it is; see! Here's dad in his chair and ma in hers, and, if you go back far enough, granddad in his, just as you say, Bailey. And here's me, a little shaver, squattin' on the floor by the stove, lookin' at the pictures in a heap of Godey's Lady's Book. And says dad, 'Bos'n,' he says--he used to call me 'Bos'n' in those days--'Bos'n,' says dad, 'run down cellar and fetch me up a pitcher of cider, that's a good feller.' Yes, yes; that's this room as I've seen it in my mind ever since I tiptoed through it the night I run away, with my duds in a bundle under my arm. Do you wonder I was fightin' mad when I saw what that Howes tribe had done to it?"

Superintending the making over of the old home occupied most of Captain Cy's daylight time that summer. His evenings were spent at Simmons's store. We have no clubs in Bayport, strictly speaking, for the sewing circle and the Shakespeare Reading Society are exclusively feminine in membership; therefore Simmons's store is the gathering place of those males who are bachelors or widowers or who are sufficiently free from petticoat government to risk an occasional evening out. Asaph Tidditt was a regular sojourner at the store. Bailey Bangs, happening in to purchase fifty cents' worth of sugar or to have the molasses jug filled, lingered occasionally, but not often. Captain Cy explained Bailey's absence in characteristic fashion.

"Variety," observed the captain, "is the spice of life. Bailey gets talk enough to home. What's the use of his comin' up here to get more?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Josiah Dimick, with a grin, "we let him do some of the talkin' himself up here. Down at the boardin' house Keturah and Angie Phinney do it all."

"Yes. Still, if a feller was condemned to live over a biler factory he wouldn't hanker to get a job IN it, would he? When Bailey was a delegate to the Methodist Conference up in Boston, him and a crowd visited the deef and dumb asylum. When 'twas time to go, he was missin', and they found him in the female ward lookin' at the inmates. Said that the sight of all them women, every one of 'em not able to say a word, was the most wonderful thing ever he laid eyes on. Said it made him feel kind of reverent and holy, almost as if he was in Paradise. So Ase Tidditt says, anyway; it's his yarn."

"'Tain't nuther, Cy Whittaker!" declared the indignant Asaph. "If you expect I'm goin' to father all your lies, you're mistaken."

The crowd at Simmons's discuss politics, as a general thing; state and national politics in their seasons, but county politics and local affairs always. The question in Bayport that summer, aside from that of the harbor appropriation, was who should be hired as downstairs teacher. Our schoolhouse is a two-story building, with a schoolroom on each floor. The lower room, where the little tots begin with their "C--A--T Cat," and progress until they have mastered the Fourth Reader, is called " downstairs." "Upstairs" is, of course, the second story, where the older children are taught. To handle some of the "big boys" upstairs is a task for a healthy man, and such a one usually fills the teacher's position there. Downstairs being, in theory, at least, less strenuous, is presided over by a woman.

Miss Seabury, who had been downstairs teacher for one lively term, had resigned that spring in tears and humiliation. Her scholars had enjoyed themselves and would have liked her to continue, but the committee and the townspeople thought otherwise. There was a general feeling that enjoyment was not the whole aim of education.

"Betty," said Captain Dimick, referring to his small granddaughter, "has done fust rate so fur's marksmanship and lung trainin' goes. I cal'late she can hit a nail head ten foot off with a spitball three times out of four, and she can whisper loud enough to be understood in Jericho. But, not wishing to be unreasonable, still I should like to have her spell 'door' without an 'e.' I've always been used to seein' it spelled that way and--well, I'm kind of old- fashioned, anyway."

There was a difference of opinion concerning Miss Seabury's successor. A portion of the townspeople were for hiring a graduate of the State Normal School, a young woman with modern training. Others, remembering that Miss Seabury had graduated from that school, were for proved ability and less up-to-date methods. These latter had selected a candidate in the person of a Miss Phoebe Dawes, a resident of Wellmouth, and teacher of the Wellmouth "downstairs" for some years. The arguments at Simmons's were hot ones.

"What's the use of hirin' somebody from right next door to us, as you might say?" demanded Alpheus Smalley, clerk at the store. "Don't we want our teachin' to be abreast of the times, and is Wellmouth abreast of ANYthing?"

"It's abreast of the bay, that's about all, I will give in," replied Mr. Tidditt. "But, the way I look at it, we need disCIPline more 'n anything else, and Phoebe Dawes has had the best disCIPline in her school, that's been known in these latitudes. Order? Why, say! Eben Salters told me that when he visited her room over there 'twas so still that he didn't dast to rub one shoe against t'other, it sounded up so. He had to set still and bear his chilblains best he could. And POPULAR! Why, when she hinted that she might leave in May, her scholars more 'n ha'f of 'em, bust out cryin'. Now you hear me, I--"

"It seems to me," put in Thaddeus Simpson, who ran the barber shop and was something of a politician, "it seems to me, fellers, that we'd better wait and hear what Mr. Atkins has to say in this matter. I guess that's what the committee 'll do, anyhow. We