shelf where the dishes should have been, opened the door. Before he went
out, however, he turned and said:

"Perez, you and Jerry can be fixin' up the advertisement while I'm gone.
You can let me see it when I come back. I say, Jerry," he added to the
"sacrifice," who sat gazing at the pennies on the table in a sort of
trance, "don't feel bad about it. Why, when you come to think of it,
it's a providence it turned out that way. Me and Perez are bachelors,
and we'd be jest green hands. But you're a able seaman, you know what it
is to manage a wife."

"Yes, I do," groaned Captain Jerry lugubriously. "Durn it, that's jest
it!"

Captain Eri was chuckling as, lantern in hand, he passed around the
corner of the little white house on the way to the barn. He chuckled
all through the harnessing of Daniel, the venerable white horse. He was
still chuckling as, perched on the seat of the "truck wagon," he rattled
and shook out of the yard and turned into the sandy road that led up to
the village. And an outsider, hearing these chuckles, and knowing what
had gone before, might have inferred that perhaps Captain Eri did not
view the "matching" and the matrimonial project with quite the deadly
seriousness of the other two occupants of the house by the shore.



CHAPTER II

THE TRAIN COMES IN