horse don't take a notion to lay down in the road and go to sleep, or a
wheel don't come off or some other surprise party ain't sprung on you,
you come to a place where there's a Baptist chapel that needs painting,
and a little two-for-a-cent store that needs trade, and two or three
houses that need building over, and any Lord's quantity of scrub pines
and beach grass and sand. Then you take Labe's word for it that you've
got to Wellmouth Port and get out of the barge and try to remember
you're a church member.

Well, Aunt Sophrony's house was a mile or more from the place where the
barge stopped, and Jonadab and me, we hoofed it up there. We bought some
cheese and crackers and canned things at the store, 'cause we expected
to stay overnight in the house, and knew there wasn't no other way of
getting provender.

We got there after a spell and set down on the big piazza with our souls
full of gratitude and our boots full of sand. Great, big, old-fashioned
house with fourteen big bedrooms in it, big barn, sheds, and one thing
or 'nother, and perched right on top of a hill with five or six acres
of ground 'round it. And how the March wind did whoop in off the sea and
howl and screech lonesomeness through the pine trees! You take it in
the middle of the night, with the shutters rattling and the old joists
a-creaking and Jonadab snoring like a chap sawing hollow logs, and if
it wan't joy then my name ain't Barzilla Wingate. I don't wonder Aunt
Sophrony died. I'd have died 'long afore she did if I knew I was checked
plumb through to perdition. There'd be some company where I was going,
anyhow.

The next morning after ballasting up with the truck we'd bought at the
store--the feller 'most keeled over when he found we was going to pay