handsomer to count, either. I hired a couple of them rooms, one to sleep in and smoke in, and t’other to entertain the parson in, if he should call, which—unless the profession had changed, too—I judged he would do pretty quick. I had the rooms cleaned and papered, bought some dyspepsy medicine to offset the meals I was likely to have, and settled down to be what Mr. Pike had called a "gentleman of leisure."Fust three months ’twas fine. At the end of the second three it commenced to get a little mite dull. In about two more I found my mind was shrinkin’ so that the little mean cat-talks at the breakfast table was beginnin’ to seem interestin’ and important. Then I knew ’twas time to doctor up with somethin’ besides dyspepsy pills. Ossification was settin’ in and I’d got to do somethin’ to keep me interested, even if I paid for Pike’s hats for the next generation. 

You see, there was such a sameness to the programme. Turn out in the mornin’, eat and listen to gossip, go out and take a walk, smoke, talk with folks I met—more gossip—come back and eat again, go over and watch the carpenters on the latest summer cottage, smoke some more, eat some more, and then go down to the Ostable Grocery, Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes and Fancy Goods Store, or to the post-office, and set around with the gang till bedtime. That may be an excitin’ life for a jellyfish, or a reg’lar Ostable loafer—but it didn’t suit me. 

I was feelin’ that way, and pretty desperate, the night when Winthrop Adams Beanblossom—which wa’n’t the critter’s name but is nigh enough to the real one for him to cruise under in this yarn—told me the story of his life and started me on the v’yage that come to mean so much to me. I didn’t know 'twas goin’ to mean much of anything when I started in. But that night Winthrop got me to paddlin’, so’s to speak, and, later on, come Jim Henry Jacobs to coax me into deeper water; and, after that, the combination of them two and Miss Letitia Lee Pendlebury shoved me in all under, so ’twas a case of stickin’ to it or swimmin’ or drownin’. 

I was in the Ostable Store that evenin’, as usual. 'Twas almost nine o’clock and the rest of the bunch around the stove had gone home. I was fillin’ my pipe and cal’latin’ to go, too—if you can call a tavern like the Poquit House a home. Beanblossom was in behind the desk, his funny little grizzly-gray head down over a pile of account books and papers, his specs roostin’ on the end of his thin nose, and his pen scratchin’ away like a stray hen in a flower bed. 

"Well, Beanblossom," says I, gettin’ up and stretchin’, "I cal’late it’s time to 

 Prev. P 3/171 next