beginning, but I have been a trying all the way to settle it who you
could be. I've been up country some weeks, stopping with my mother, and
she seemed so set to have me stay till strawberry-time, and would hardly
let me come now. You see she's getting to be old; why, every time I've
come away for fifteen years she's said it was the last time I'd ever see
her, but she's a dreadful smart woman of her age. 'He' wrote me some o'
Mrs. Lancaster's folks were going to take the Brandon house this summer;
and so you are the ones? It's a sightly old place; I used to go and see
Miss Katharine. She must have left a power of china-ware. She set a
great deal by the house, and she kept everything just as it used to be
in her mother's day."

"Then you live in Deephaven too?" asked Kate.

"I've been here the better part of my life. I was raised up among the
hills in Vermont, and I shall always be a real up-country woman if I
live here a hundred years. The sea doesn't come natural to me, it kind
of worries me, though you won't find a happier woman than I be, 'long
shore. When I was first married 'he' had a schooner and went to the
banks, and once he was off on a whaling voyage, and I hope I may never
come to so long a three years as those were again, though I was up to
mother's. Before I was married he had been 'most everywhere. When he
came home that time from whaling, he found I'd taken it so to heart that
he said he'd never go off again, and then he got the chance to keep
Deephaven Light, and we've lived there seventeen years come January.
There isn't great pay, but then nobody tries to get it away from us, and
we've got so's to be contented, if it is lonesome in winter."

"Do you really live in the lighthouse? I remember how I used to beg to
be taken out there when I was a child, and how I used to watch for the