ry little applause when she finished. The women were
looking for their handkerchiefs, and many of the men stared at the
ceiling with shiny eyes.

"H'm," said Salters; "that 'u'd cost ye a dollar to hear at any
theatre--maybe two. Some folk, I presoom, can afford it. 'Seems
downright waste to me. . . . Naow, how in Jerusalem did Cap. Bart
Edwardes strike adrift here?"

"No keepin' him under," said an Eastport man behind. "He's a poet, an'
he's baound to say his piece. 'Comes from daown aour way, too."

He did not say that Captain B. Edwardes had striven for five
consecutive years to be allowed to recite a piece of his own
composition on Gloucester Memorial Day. An amused and exhausted
committee had at last given him his desire. The simplicity and utter
happiness of the old man, as he stood up in his very best Sunday
clothes, won the audience ere he opened his mouth. They sat unmurmuring
through seven-and-thirty hatchet-made verses describing at fullest
length the loss of the schooner _Joan Hasken_ off the Georges in the gale
of 1867, and when he came to an end they shouted with one kindly throat.

A far-sighted Boston reporter slid away for a full copy of the epic and
an interview with the author; so that earth had nothing more to offer
Captain Bart Edwardes, ex-whaler, shipwright, master-fisherman, and
poet, in the seventy-third year of his age.

"Naow, I call that sensible," said the Eastport man. "I've bin over
that graound with his writin', jest as he read it, in my two hands, and
I can testify that he's got it all in."

"If Dan here couldn't do better'n that with one hand before breakfast,
he ought to be switched," said Salters, upholding the honor of
Massachusetts on general principles. "Not but what I'm free to own he's
considerable litt'ery--fer Maine. Still--"

"Guess Uncle Salters's goin' to die this trip. Fust compliment he's
ever paid me," Dan sniggered. "What's wrong with you, Harve? You act
all quiet and you look greenish. Feelin' sick?"

"Don't know what's the matter with me," Harvey implied. "Seems if my
insides were too big for my outsides. I'm all crowded up and shivery."

"Dispepsy? Pshaw--too bad. We'll wait for the readin', an' then we'll
quit, an' catch the tide."

The widows--they were nearly all of that season's making--braced
themselves rigidly like people going to be shot in cold blood, for they
knew what was coming. The summer-boarder girls in pink and blue
shirt-waists stopped titt