person. She doesn't believe in "signs," although she might feel uncomfortable if she broke a looking-glass or saw the new moon over her left shoulder. She has a most amazing fund of common-sense and is "down" on Spiritualism to a degree. It is one of Bayport's pet yarns, that at the Harniss Spiritualist camp-meeting when the "test medium" announced from the platform that he had a message for a lady named Hephzibah C--he "seemed to get the name Hephzibah C"-- Hephzy got up and walked out. "Any dead relations I've got," she declared, "who send messages through a longhaired idiot like that one up there"--meaning the medium,--"can't have much to say that's worth listenin' to. They can talk to themselves if they want to, but they shan't waste MY time."

In but one particular was Hephzy superstitious. Whenever she dreamed of "Little Frank" she was certain something was going to happen. She had dreamed of "Little Frank" the night before and, if she had not been headed off, she would have talked of nothing else.

"I saw him just as plain as I see you this minute, Hosy," she said to me. "I was somewhere, in a strange place--a foreign place, I should say 'twas--and there I saw him. He didn't know me; at least I don't think he did."

"Considering that he never saw you that isn't so surprising," I interrupted. "I think Mr. Campbell would have another cup of coffee if you urged him. Susanna, take Mr. Campbell's cup."

Jim declined the coffee; said he hadn't finished his first cup yet. I knew that, of course, but I was trying to head off Hephzy. She refused to be headed, just then.

"But I knew HIM," she went on. "He looked just the same as he has when I've seen him before--in the other dreams, you know. The very image of his mother. Isn't it wonderful, Hosy!"

"Yes; but don't resurrect the family skeletons, Hephzy. Mr. Campbell isn't interested in anatomy."

"Skeletons! I don't know what you're talkin' about. He wasn't a skeleton. I saw him just as plain! And I said to myself, 'It's little Frank!' Now what do you suppose he came to me for? What do you suppose it means? It means somethin', I know that."

"Means that you weren't sleeping well, probably," I answered. "Jim, here, will dream of cross-seas and the Point Rip to-night, I have no doubt."

Jim promptly declared that if he thought that likely he shouldn't mind so much. What he feared most was a nightmare session with an author.

Hephzibah was interested at once. "Oh, do you dream about authors, Mr. Campbell?" she demanded. "I presume likely you do, they're so mixed up with your business. Do your dreams ever come true?"

"Not often," was the solemn reply. "Most of my dream-authors are rational and almost human."

Hephzy, of course, did not understand this, but it did have the effect for which I had been striving, that of driving "Little Frank" from her mind for the time.

"I don't care," she declared, "I s'pose it's awful foolish and silly of me, but it does seem sometimes as if there was somethin' in dreams, some kind of dreams. Hosy laughs at me and maybe I ought to laugh at myself, but some dreams come true, or awfully near to true; now don't they. Angeline Phinney was in here the other day and she was tellin' about her second cousin that was-- he's dead now--Abednego Small. He was constable here in Bayport for years; everybody called him 'Uncle Bedny.' Uncle Bedny had been keepin' company with a woman named Dimick--Josiah Dimick's niece--lots younger than he, she was. He'd been thinkin' of marryin' her, so Angie said, but his folks had been talkin' to him, tellin' him he was too old to take such a young woman for his third wife, so he had made up his mind to throw her over, to write a letter sayin' it was all off between 'em. Well, he'd begun the letter but he never finished it, for three nights runnin' he dreamed that awful trouble was hangin' over him. That dream made such an impression on him that he tore the letter up and married the Dimick woman after all. And then--I didn't know this until Angie told me--it turned out that she had heard he was goin' to give her the go-by and had made all her arrangements to sue him for breach of promise if he did. That was the awful trouble, you see, and the dream saved him from it."

I smiled. "The fault there was in the interpretation of the dream," I said. "The 'awful trouble' of the breach of promise suit wouldn't have been a circumstance to the trouble poor Uncle Bedny got into by marrying Ann Dimick. THAT trouble lasted till he died."

Hephzibah laughed and said she guessed that was so, she hadn't thought of it in that way.

"Probably dreams are all nonsense," she admitted. "Usually, I don't pay much attention to 'em. But when I dream of poor 'Little Frank,' away off there, I--"

"Come into the sitting-room, Jim," I put in hastily. "I have a cigar or two there. I don't buy them in Bayport, either."

"And who," asked Jim, as we sat smoking by the fire, "is Little Frank?"

"He is a mythical relative of ours," I explained, shortly. "He was born twenty years ago or so--at least we heard that he was; and we haven't heard anything of him since, except by the dream route, which is not entirely convincing. He is Hephzy's pet obsession. Kindly forget him, to oblige me."

He looked puzzled, but he did not mention "Little Frank" again, for which I was thankful.

That afternoon we walked up to the village, stopping in at Simmons's store, which is also the post-office, for the mail. Captain Cyrus Whittaker happened to be there, also Asaph Tidditt and Bailey Bangs and Sylvanus Cahoon and several others. I introduced Campbell to the crowd and he seemed to be enjoying himself. When we came out and were walking home again, he observed:

"That Whittaker is an interesting chap, isn't he?"

"Yes," I said. "He is all right. Been everywhere and seen everything."

"And that," with an odd significance in his tone, "may possibly help to make him interesting, don't you think?"

"I suppose so. He lives here in Bayport now, though."

"So I gathered. Popular, is he?"

"Very."

"Satisfied with life?"

"Seems to be."

"Hum! No one calls HIM a--what is it--quahaug?"

"No, I'm the only human clam in this neighborhood."

He did not say any more, nor did I. My fit of the blues was on again and his silence on the subject in which I was interested, my work and my future, troubled me and made me more despondent. I began to lose faith in the "prescription" which he had promised so emphatically. How could he, or anyone else, help me? No one could write my stories but myself, and I knew, only too well, that I could not write them.

The only mail matter in our box was a letter addressed to Hephzibah. I forgot it until after supper and then I gave it to her. Jim retired early; the salt air made him sleepy, so he said, and he went upstairs shortly after nine. He had not mentioned our talk of the morning, nor did he until I left him at the door of his room. Then he said:

"Kent, I've got one of the answers to your conundrum. I've diagnosed one of your troubles. You're blind."

"Blind?"

"Yes, blind. Or, if not blind altogether you're suffering from the worse case of far-sightedness I ever saw. All your literary--we'll call it that for compliment's sake--all your literary life you've spent writing about people and things so far off you don't know anything about them. You and your dukes and your earls and your titled ladies! What do you know of that crowd? You never saw a lord in your life. Why don't you write of something near by, something or somebody you are acquainted with?"

"Acquainted with! You're crazy, man. What am I acquainted with, except this house, and myself and my books and--and Bayport?"

"That's enough. Why, there is material in that gang at the post- office to make a dozen books. Write about them."

"Tut! tut! tut! You ARE crazy. What shall I write; the life of Ase Tidditt in four volumes, beginning with 'I swan to man' and ending with 'By godfrey'?"

"You might do worse. If the book were as funny as its hero I'd undertake to sell a few copies."

"Funny! _I_ couldn't write a funny book."

"Not an intentionally funny one, you mean. But there! There's no use to talk to you."

"There is not, if you talk like an imbecile. Is this your brilliant 'prescription'?"

"No. It might be; it would be, if you would take it, but you won't--not now. You need something else first and I'll give it to you. But I'll tell you this, and I mean it: Downstairs, in that dining-room of yours, there's one mighty good story, at least."

"The dining-room? A story in the dining-room?"