the next world. But even I was not permitted to go out in a boat on Sunday, though I could ride if my riding was for a definite purpose, as to visit my relatives. I could never understand the distinction.

We had the natural scorn of all selfcentered communities for neighboring towns, and for Patchogue, on the opposite side of the island, which even then was outstripping us numerically, there was the additional feeling of jealousy in its growth. We spoke of its inhabitants as "baymen," which was contempt enough in the minds of a people who did their voyaging on waters too deep for oyster-tongs. The people of Mount Sinai, to the east of us, we derisively named "Eel-towners," and with the boys of Setauket, to the west, we had feuds. But our Boeotia was Manor, which we called Punk's Hole. Doubtless they had their flings at us, too.

That sacred arcanum of true Americanism in the minds of government theorists, the town meeting, was still a living institution when I was a boy, and in the middle of the island all these warring villages used to meet for their annual deliberation. For the mere pleasure of the excitement I sometimes went out, but not being a voter, I never entered the town hall to acquire the principles of justice. I gather that the justice was exemplified by the South Side and the North Side uniformly voting against each other on general principles. I went to view the throng that gathered in the field about the hall. It had some of the characteristics of a county fair, inasmuch as venders of soft drinks and food and fakers of all sorts made the neighborhood vocal with their raucous voices; but differed in that there was nothing to see but the spectators themselves.

I suppose it was for this reason that they made themselves as offensive as possible, finding in brawling and the horse-play that led up to it a certain sort of distinction. There was always much drinking; sectional antagonisms were ever present, as was, of course, the general attitude of suspicion toward one another of men who meet as strangers, but on common ground. Yet it was not without its good-natured and even pic

turesque sides. Wrestling matches were frequent, and in a great ring of partizan spectators a would-be champion would take his stand and challenge all-comers. One affair of the sort I remember with peculiar interest, with its reminiscent flavor of Berkshire and Old Benjy and the "veasts" of Tom Brown's day. A solid young man of perhaps twenty had stationed himself in the ring, when over the heads of the spectators a cap was tossed to his feet, and a man pushed his way through and advanced to accept the challenge. He seemed very old to me then, with my perspective of youth, but surely he must have been sixty-a small, but still active man, dressed in gray corduroy, with thick gray hair, a face of the color of a golden-russet apple that had withered a little in the first frosts of winter, but was still sound and sweet. He had quick, shifting, but merry, eyes. The good-will of the crowd was his from the first, though not untouched by a half-conscious contempt for his folly. After a moment of hesitation the younger man accepted the situation with the ill grace of one being mocked, and a moment later, now wholly sheepish, lay flat on his back. He demanded another trial, with the same result, and subdued he went out of the ring.

Two or three wrestlers entered the ring after his departure, only to follow him into defeat, and after a long waiting in which no other contestant appeared, the victor, with an odd little Old-World duck of his head and a pull at his forelock, went jauntily forth, the hero of the hour, but altogether unknown.

I tried to learn who he was, but no one knew. Indeed, there were many odd characters scattered about through the township, and oddity was too common to make it an excuse for men to beat a path to its door. We had many within the limits of our village. Every Fourth of July, Tommy Jack, a tall old Indian, in the feather head-dress of a chief, came down from his hut in the hills and solemnly stalked through the streets. fear he was never quite sober, but he was wholly good-natured, and I think he enjoyed the sensation he made and even the boisterous and sometimes oppressive attention we paid him. We young people believed him to be the

hereditary king of the region, and through all our boyish teasing something of our awe of him as the last of his race must have been manifest. I hope that it warmed his lonely old heart.

And there was "Daddy" W-, an elderly shoemaker, who displayed in the dusty front window of his tiny shop a few jars of stick candy. He sold two sticks for a penny, no one said "cent" at that place and period, but if by any chance a child was so peculiarly constituted that he or she wished only one, Daddy Wwould gravely cut the penny in two equal pieces and give one back to the child. Except as a novel variation in life, the proceeding was hardly popular with children, the extra half-penny having no currency elsewhere. Daddy W- disposed of his divided coins was a mystery that no questioning ever solved. He stoutly held to a theory of his own that the smell of leather was an excellent developer of the human brain, and I am not prepared to deny it; if he had argued that it produced a contentious spirit, I might have heartily agreed, all the workers in leather that I have ever known having been, with a single exception, keen for debate.

How

The exception was also a shoemaker in the town, and possibly his variation from type lay in the fact that he was deaf and dumb and lacked the readier facilities for discussion. But he was popular, and a visit to his shop on business was always a pleasure. On the wall by his bench hung a slate, with a pencil attached to it by a string, on which we would write our directions. His own writing in reply was always better than ours, and his manifest appreciation of his own superiority on that one point was not at all humiliating; rather, it made us proud of him as a notable institution of the village. He was always spoken of as "the dummy," his wife was "the dummy's wife," and his children "the dummy's children," or "the little dummies," though there was nothing dumb about them. By intention there was nothing of cruelty or contempt about this. Their surname was a common one in the neighborhood, and we merely chose the shortest road to identification. It was a patronymic in the making, as all such originally arose from a

man's trade or habitation or physical peculiarity. I recall the grieved surprise of a young girl in school who was reproved by the new principal because she identified for him a child as "the dummy's boy." It was far from her thought to be discourteous or unkind; that was not in her nature. Following the easy habit of the community, she always thought of the man as really "Mr. Dummy," as once one might have thought of "Mr. Smith" or "Mr. Long."

Perhaps we were not always so free from intention to touch the raw spot of a disability. A blacksmith in the town was a most marvelous stutterer, and it was always a temptation to excite him, for when he became angry or confused he would swear with a fluency as remarkable as was his hesitation in speech in his placid moments. I think that usually he rather enjoyed these moments of release, but once I knew him to flee at the very thought of the possibility. At the time of the great revival already mentioned he was a frequent attendant at the meetings, always taking a seat in the rear of the church, near the doors. He was there one night when I was present, sitting immediately in front of me; but at a most exciting moment when many were rising for prayers, he hurried out of the door. The meeting was prolonged that night, and when, perhaps an hour later, another boy and I also departed, we found him still lingering outside, gazing up at the lighted windows. One of us flippantly asked him why he did not go back, "get up, and ask for the prayers of the congregation?" the usual formula. He gazed at us for a moment, then said, though I have stripped his few words somewhat of the sibilants and false starts that made the brief speech appear almost an oration.

"I w-w-w-w-want to, b-b-b-but da-dada-dass n't. At the f-f-f-first w-w-word I'd st-st-st-stutter, and then g-g-g-git confused, and then, li-li-like as not, c-cc-cuss 1-1-1-like hell. And w-w-w-where I'd b-b-b-be then-a-c-c-c-cussin' in chch-ch-church?"

We walked away, highly amused, my companion and I; but presently, when I was alone, I suddenly felt that it was tragic. To that extent, I suppose, I myself had been moved by the revival

that I could envisage him going through life "under conviction of sin," but unable to lighten the load because of his one unspeakable difficulty.

Not far from my father's house dwelt an elderly widow with a spinster daughter of middle age. If their neighbors had been of a nervous sort, which they were far from being, they might often have been disturbed by the ways of the two lonely women, for they had placidly abolished the conventions of day and night. They recognized no law of living except their own. They might rise at midnight, have dinner when the rest of the village was eating breakfast, and go to bed at noon. If no work seemed pressing to them, they might stay abed for twenty hours or more, and thus come by chance to breakfast at the normal hours of others. But irregularity was the god they served, and nothing was fixed in their actions. Neighbors, awakened at midnight by a dull, monotonous thud, would simply turn over and go to sleep again: they knew by that well-known sound that the J-s had started their spring house-cleaning, and were beating their carpets, hung on the clothes-line in the moonlight. But of course spring house-cleaning with them. would not necessarily fall in spring. A mild night in January would serve as well. It was not a thing to complain of; the placid, easy-going neighborhood naturally accepted it all as a new item for amused comment.

Indeed, it was a town where oddity, romance, and grim reality might be met at any turn of a road. Within sight of my windows dwelt a man who had been shipwrecked on the coast of Patagonia and had lived among the natives for many months. Occasionally one might meet a quiet little woman who had navigated home from South America the barque of her husband when he was ill. In a small shop on the waterfront, where we boys often stopped for pie and rootbeer, we would be waited on by a little old man who had been seized by the press-gang and had served on a British man-of-war. Not far from his shop was the private boat-house of a handsome, courteous retired captain who was reputed to have fitted out the Yacht Wanderer, once famous in the African slave

trade; and there used to pass through our streets a quiet man of whom it was whispered, in a horror that familiarity never allayed, that once, when as mate and acting captain, bringing home his dead captain from Surinam in a cask of rum, in his madness for drink he had secretly half emptied the cask. We were sometimes amused, too, by the eccentricity of genius. William S. Mount, famous as an artist when I was a small boy, dwelt in the neighborhood, and often on still summer nights he would row out on the bay and for hours play a flute.

There were, too, winters of many shipwrecks, when every house seemed a house of mourning, and the churches, on Sundays, with the black dresses of the women, appeared more like chapels for nuns. Yet those who escaped the sea or remained at home lived on to a green old age. A dozen years ago Sally Ann, an old negro woman of the town, came to her hundredth birthday. She had lived there all her life and had worked at various times for half the people of the village, and the whole town united in giving her a birthday party, which was held in the largest church. It had been the happy idea of the organizers to have present what they were pleased to call the "infant-class," to which no one was eligible who had not reached the age of seventy-five. Yet in that small town of perhaps fifteen hundred inhabitants, nearly eighty who had reached or passed that age were present that night. Among the number were two twin sisters of eighty-five. The town had collected. a substantial sum of money as a birthday gift for Sally Ann. She accepted the gift in a speech of thanks. There were many eyes dim with tears when she said, "Somehow I don't appear to feel so well since I stopped going out to work by the day." She had stopped scarcely three years before! Yet even then she was so far from helpless that she had made with her own hands the dress she wore on the great occasion.

There were many negroes in the town, few of whom were not industrious and respected. Perhaps it was due to their supposed characteristic of being "the happiest people under the sun" that as long ago as when I was a small boy they had already instituted the custom of a

half-holiday on Saturday. Early in the afternoon they would begin to collect in groups about the waterfront and side streets, both men and women, and if there was revelry among them before the night closed, it was quietly conducted. All that I ever saw of a sportive spirit I saw one afternoon in summer from the open doors of the sail-loft. Below us two negroes stood talking. One was Jerry, a tall, shambling man of perhaps thirty, who, while always extremely courteous to white folks of every age and condition, in his opinion of himself as their best fighting man, was inclined to lord it over his own people. His companion was a much younger negro, named John, from Wading River, a village a few miles to the east. Presently, as we watched the two, we heard Jerry, with all his usual courtesy, say:

“John, John, do you know what I'd do to you if I really felt just like it? I'd take you by the collar and I'd take you by one leg, and I 'd chuck you up in the air; then when you come down, I 'd smash ye-damn ye!"

John had listened in apparent humility, with his eyes turned toward the ground; when Jerry came to the words, "I'd smash ye-damn ye!" he turned half away from his companion and shot out a long arm at the empty air in pantomimic illustration of what he would do. At that moment John proved that his eyes had not been turned toward the ground without purpose, for in a flash he stooped to one side, picked up a stone as large as a half-brick, and with a mighty swing of his arm smote the back of Jerry's head, then deftly tossed the stone behind him.

Jerry staggered under the blow, which would have crushed an ordinary man's head, then slowly turned and looked at John with something akin to awe in his face.

"Lord! John," he said, "I did n't know you could hit so hard. I sure did n't.” A moment later, in perfect amicability, the two slouched along the dusty road together. Poor Jerry! The pitcher in the end went to the well once too often. Years later he returned home one day, picked a quarrel with his own son, and as they struggled on the ground, Jerry's wife rushed from the house, caught up an

ax, and struck him two blows in the small of the back. It was Jerry's last fight and one of our few tragedies.

Indeed, it was a peace-loving, lawabiding community. There was no lockup in the village, and the office of constable was a perfunctory one. A family, leaving town for a week, might recall when too late that in their haste to get the early stage to the railroad they had left the front door of their house open. The fact would give them no concern. They would know that some thoughtful neighbor, noting the open door, would at least close it; probably, indeed, go so far as to lock it and place the key under the door-mat. We always placed the key under the mat when we went out for a day or an evening. It was safer there than in one's pocket or hand-bag, and a nuisance to carry, for door-keys were large and heavy at that period.

Life was simple; adventure and excitement we left to the sea. From September till May the lights in the village would begin to go out by nine, and if by any chance one shone from a window at ten, it was safe to assume that some one was ill in the house or that "maids were a-courting." But in winter, when coasting was good, the hills would be crowded till a late hour. The finest coasting hill I have ever known, the Long Road, ran within three hundred feet of my father's house, and from my room at night I could hear the rattle of the sleds and the long-drawn, wailing cry of "Road!" as the sleds flashed down to the harbor. More often, however, I was one of the last to leave the hill, tired, but happy.

But however tired I might be, whenever I went to my room at night, the last thing I did before tumbling into bed was to look from my window over the huddle of roofs down to the harbor, and out to the lighthouse beyond. And then I would think of the sea beyond that and the pitching ships and the men on watch on their decks. I like to think of it as a heritage, too, that I cannot recall a night in all my life, when I have been physically able, that I have not wakened in the dark and gone to the window and looked out to see how the night fared. And fair or foul, I think what it means to the sailor. Though I have deserted the sea, it has not deserted me.

HE wedding was over.
Grandma Martin came

T home from the station,

where the family had gone to tell Isabel and Walter good-by, with a wonderful, almost unbelievable feeling of freedom and contentment. Grandma Martin had not felt so pleasurably excited in a long time; not since years before, when Grandpa Martin was alive, and they lived in the little, square, white house in Morrilton. But this was now, and grandma had the same tremulous feeling of happiness.

It was n't because Isabel was married; that is, not because of what marriage might mean to Isabel. Walter was a nice fellow, of course; grandma had seen to that. It was n't for Isabel's sake; that it was nice to think of Isabel as a bride that made grandma happy. It was n't because grandma had gone to the church and then to the station and home again in a taxi-cab; grandma had ridden in automobiles before,

So

a number of times: at old Mrs. Wentworth's funeral, and the time Mrs. Rogers was so sick and had sent for her; once rich Mrs. Grantner had taken her for a ride, too. And grandma went to church every Sunday when her rheumatism was n't too bad. it was n't the ride or the church. Of course grandma's happiness was due, in a way, to Isabel's marriage; grandma knew that Isabel was Mrs. Walter Reynolds now because of her efforts, and grandma knew that Isabel's father-grandma's son, David

Grandma

was so very happy now; for, and for the first time in twelve years, grandma was going to have her own room.

A bedroom to herself! A real, regular bedroom, with a big closet in it and two windows, and a real bed and a dresser and two chairs! The room had been Isabel's, and now Isabel was married, had gone away for a honeymoon, was going to have an apartment of her own when she came back.

There may be those who would have sneered at the bedroom, those to whom white-enameled and brass beds are not the last words in elegance, to whom red and shining almost-mahogany dressers are not things of beauty. Grandma

Martin was not one of them. The wallpaper had been of Isabel's choosing, a cream paper covered with big red roses and with a cut-out border of roses in even larger and more impossible shapes and colorings. It never occurred to grandma that this wall-paper might be

changed for her, though, given a choice of wall-papers, an impossible situation, grandma would have chosen something simpler and plainer; grandma liked plain things. Grandma accepted the room as it was, perfect room, her own room. It was just a step from the one bathroom. You could open the windows the way you wanted them, lots of ventilation or just a little, turn the radiator off or on, obeying only your own whims or those of the janitor-in regard to heat.

More than that, that bedroom opened up to grandma

But

mother. That was all right. grandma knew why she had wanted Isabel to get married, and knew why she

avenues.

Just think of it, in your own room you can go to bed, if you like, when you like, with no thought to the other