in those days--'Bos'n,' says dad, 'run down cellar and fetch me up a
pitcher of cider, that's a good feller.' Yes, yes; that's this room as
I've seen it in my mind ever since I tiptoed through it the night I
run away, with my duds in a bundle under my arm. Do you wonder I was
fightin' mad when I saw what that Howes tribe had done to it?"

Superintending the making over of the old home occupied most of Captain
Cy's daylight time that summer. His evenings were spent at Simmons's
store. We have no clubs in Bayport, strictly speaking, for the sewing
circle and the Shakespeare Reading Society are exclusively feminine in
membership; therefore Simmons's store is the gathering place of those
males who are bachelors or widowers or who are sufficiently free from
petticoat government to risk an occasional evening out. Asaph Tidditt
was a regular sojourner at the store. Bailey Bangs, happening in to
purchase fifty cents' worth of sugar or to have the molasses jug filled,
lingered occasionally, but not often. Captain Cy explained Bailey's
absence in characteristic fashion.

"Variety," observed the captain, "is the spice of life. Bailey gets talk
enough to home. What's the use of his comin' up here to get more?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Josiah Dimick, with a grin, "we let him do some
of the talkin' himself up here. Down at the boardin' house Keturah and
Angie Phinney do it all."

"Yes. Still, if a feller was condemned to live over a biler factory he
wouldn't hanker to get a job IN it, would he? When Bailey was a delegate
to the Methodist Conference up in Boston, him and a crowd visited the
deef and dumb asylum. When 'twas time to go, he was missin', and they
found him in the female ward lookin' at the inmates. Said that the sight