the Ladies of Honor, and prominent socially, as was Mrs. Dott; but Mr.
Cohen bought cheap and sold cheap, and the Emporium flourished like a
green bay tree, while the Metropolitan Store was rapidly going to seed.
Daniel, looking out through the front window at the blue sea in the
distance, thought of the past, of the days when, as commander and
part owner of the three masted schooner Bluebird, he had been free and
prosperous and happy. Then he considered the future, which was bluer
than the sea, and sighed again. Why had he not been content to stick
to the profession he understood, to remain on the salt water he loved;
instead of retiring from the sea to live on dry land and squander his
small fortune in a business for which he was entirely unfitted?

And yet the answer was simple enough. Mrs. Dott--Mrs. Serena Dott, his
wife--was the answer, she and her social aspirations. It was Serena
who had coaxed him into giving up seafaring; who had said that it was
a shame for him to waste his life ordering foremast hands about when he
might be one of the leading citizens in his native town. It was Serena
who had persuaded him to invest the larger part of his savings in
the Metropolitan Store. Serena, who had insisted that Gertrude, their
daughter and only child, should leave home to attend the fashionable
and expensive seminary near Boston. Serena who--but there! it was all
Serena; and had been ever since they were married. Captain Daniel, on
board his schooner, was a man whose word was law. On shore, he was law
abiding, and his words were few.

The side door of the store--that leading to the yard separating it from
the Dott homestead--opened, and Azuba Ginn appeared. Azuba had been
the Dott maid of all work for eighteen years, ever since Gertrude was a
baby. She was married, but her husband, Laban Ginn, was mate on a steam
freighter running between New York and almost anywhere, and his shore