"No," I said; "this one is quite different. You will have no trouble in sleeping over this one, Ase."

"That's a comfort. Got a little Bayport in it? Seems to me you ought to put a little Bayport in, for a change."

I smiled. "There is a little in this," I answered. "A little at the beginning, and, perhaps, at the end."

"You don't say! You ain't got me in it, have you? I'd--I'd look kind of funny in a book, wouldn't I?"

I laughed, but I did not answer.

"Not that I ain't seen things in my life," went on Asaph, hopefully. "A man can't be town clerk in a live town like this and not see things. But I hope you won't put any more foreigners in. This we're readin' now," rapping the newspaper with his knuckles, "gives us all we want to know about foreigners. Just savages, they be, as you say, and nothin' more. I pity 'em."

I laughed again.

"Asaph," said I, "what would you say if I told you that the English and French--yes, and the Germans, too, though I haven't seen them at home as I have the others--were no more savages than we are?"

"I'd say you was crazy," was the prompt answer.

"Well, I'm not. And you're not very complimentary. You're forgetting again. You forget that I married one of those savages."

Asaph was taken aback, but he recovered promptly, as he had before.

"She ain't any savage," he announced. "Her mother was born right here in Bayport. And she knows, just as I do, that Bayport's the best place in the world; don't you, Mrs. Knowles?"

"Yes," said Frances, "I am sure of it, Mr. Tidditt."

So Asaph went away triumphantly happy. After he had gone I apologized for him.

"He's a fair sample," I said. "He is a quahaug, although he doesn't know it. He is a certain type, an exaggerated type, of American."

Frances smiled. "He's not much worse than I used to be," she said. "I used to call America an uncivilized country, you remember. I suppose I--and Mr. Heathcroft--were exaggerated types of a certain kind of English. We were English quahaugs, weren't we?"

Hephzy nodded. "We're all quahaugs," she declared. "Most of us, anyhow. That's the trouble with all the folks of all the nations; they stay in their shells and they don't try to know and understand their neighbors. Kent, you used to be a quahaug--a different kind of one--but that kind, too. I was a quahaug afore I lived in Mayberry. That's who makes wars like this dreadful one--quahaugs. We know better now--you and Frances and I. We've found out that, down underneath, there's precious little difference. Humans are humans."

She paused and then, as a final summing up, added:

"I guess that's it: American or German or French or anything--nice folks are nice folks anywhere."

THE END