pace as waiting for Ben and Ann had made him later than usual. He always timed himself with the sunrise and should have his dory in the water and well started before the sun hopped up over the horizon. The others kept beside him only by running now and then with short quick steps, and when they caught him Jo would spurt ahead and the race would start again.

“Ben Seymour couldn’t have paced this,” Ben cried breathlessly. “But Allan-a-Dale can. Chasing bucks in the wood is fine for strengthening the wind.”

It was true. In the past few weeks Ben had filled out considerably and he had grown an inch as well. Ann looked down at her own strong brown lean hands; they had changed since she first undertook to handle a hoe. The healed blisters still showed on her palms but they had long ago ceased to hurt. And so the three of them frisked away in the early dawn like three young colts turned loose in the meadows.

The gray shacks of the fishermen, clustered at the mouth of the river, seemed not much larger near at hand than they looked from the bluff. They all were built with only one story, the shingled roofs coming almost down to the ground on either side. Small84 square doors led into the dark interiors and the windows were nothing but little openings cut in the walls.

84

A narrow winding lane led from the dirt road down through the ravine bordered by thick brush and the same variety of dark pines that stood about the swamp pond above. After the track reached the pebbly beach it was paved with crushed clamshells that glistened in the early light like a pale ribbon over the dark oval pebbles.

As soon as the lane met the shacks it twined gracefully in and out among them all, so that although the shacks seemed from a distance to stand together, pressed up in a heap, the lane managed to come directly to the door of each one of them. Suddenly from a regular workaday world Ann felt that she had been transplanted into a tiny village out of some fairy tale, whose inhabitants were yellow gnomes with big sou’wester hats pulled over their heads. Under the reversed brim of each gnome’s yellow oiled hat a pair of keen blue eyes, laughing as Fred Bailey’s eyes laughed, peered out at the children. Every face was brown, seamed, and leathery. Always a small stubbed pipe belched clouds of smoke about each lobsterman’s head. All the men were built alike, square and solid, and they all wore yellow.

“How do you tell them apart?” Ann asked Jo.

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