careful."

"But what's your tune?" asked his hearer; "you cannot go back to that
island."

"Yes, I'll be on it in a week--with a schooner-load of cattle. I can get
them on credit. Going to raise cattle there as a regular business. They'll
fatten in that marsh like blackbirds."

True enough, before the week was up the mended fiddle was playing its
tune. It was not until Gregory's second return from his island that he
came to see us and told us his simple story. We asked him how it was that
the steamer, that first time, had come so much earlier than she generally
did.

"She didn't," he replied. "I had miscounted one day."

"Don't you," asked my wife, who would have liked a more religious tone in
Gregory's recital, "don't you have trouble to keep run of your Sabbaths
away out there alone?"

"Why"--he smiled--"it's always Sunday there. Here almost everybody feels
duty bound to work harder than somebody else, or else make somebody else
work harder than he, and you need a day every now and then for Sunday--or
Sabbath, at least. Oh, I suppose it's all one in the end, isn't it? You
take your's in a pill, I take mine in a powder. Not that it's the least
bit like a dose, however, except for the good it does."

"And you're really prospering, even in a material way!" I said.