superintended; when they were complete he turned his attention to
interior decoration.

And now Captain Cy proceeded to, literally, astonish the natives. Among
the Howes "improvements" were gilt wall papers and modern furniture for
the lower floor of the house. The furniture they had taken with them;
the wall paper had perforce been left behind. And the captain had every
scrap of that paper stripped from the walls, and the latter re-covered
with quaint, ugly, old-fashioned patterns, stripes and roses and
flowered sprays with impossible birds flitting among them. The Bassett
decorators has pasted the gilt improvement over the old Whittaker paper,
and it was the Whittaker paper that the captain did his best to match,
sending samples here, there, and everywhere in the effort. Then, upon
the walls he hung old-fashioned pictures, such as Bayport dwellers had
long ago relegated to their attics, pictures like "From Shore to Shore,"
"Christian Viewing the City Beautiful," and "Signing the Declaration."
To these he added, bringing them from the crowded garret of the
homestead, oil paintings of ships commanded by his father and
grandfather, and family portraits, executed--which is a peculiarly
fitting word--by deceased local artists in oil and crayon.

He boarded up the fireplace in the sitting room and installed a
base-burner stove, resurrected from the tinsmith's barn. He purchased
a full "haircloth set" of parlor furniture from old Mrs. Penniman, who
never had been known to sell any of her hoarded 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