o Peter--he being engaged at the time and consequent in that
condition where he'd have put on horns and "mooed" if she'd give the
order--he thought 'twould be nice, too, and for a week it was "all hands
on deck!" getting ready for the "house-party."

Two days afore the thing was to go off the ways Brown gets a letter from
Belle, and in it says she's invited a whole lot of folks from Chicago
and New York and Boston and the land knows where, and that they've never
been to the Cape and she wants to show 'em what a "quaint" place it
is. "Can't you get," says she, "two or three delightful, queer, old
'longshore characters to be at work 'round the hotel? It'll give such a
touch of local color," she says.

So out comes Peter with the letter.

"Barzilla," he says to me, "I want some characters. Know anybody that's
a character?"

"Well," says I, "there's Nate Slocum over to Orham. He'd steal anything
that wa'n't spiked down. He's about the toughest character I can think
of, offhand, this way."

"Oh, thunder!" says Brown. "I don't want a crook; that wouldn't be any
novelty to THIS crowd," he says. "What I'm after is an odd stick;
a feller with pigeons in his loft. Not a lunatic, but jest a queer
genius--little queerer than you and the Cap'n here."

After a while we got his drift, and I happened to think of Beriah and
his chum, Eben Cobb. They lived in a little shanty over to Skakit P'int
and got their living lobstering, and so on. Both of 'em had saved a few
thousand dollars, but you couldn't get a cent of it without giving 'em
ether, and they'd rather live like Portugees than white men any day,
unless they was paid to change. Beriah's pet idee was foretelling what
the weather was going to be. And he could do it, too, better'n anybody
I ever see. He'd smell a storm further'n a cat can smell fish, and he
hardly ever made a mistake. Prided himself on it, you understand, like a
boy does on his first long pants. His prophecies was his idols, so's
to speak, and you couldn't have hired him to foretell what he knew was
wrong, not for no money.

Peter said Beriah and Eben was just the sort of "cards" he was looking
for and drove right over to see 'em. He hooked 'em, too. I knew he
would; he could talk a Come-Outer into believing that a Unitarian wasn't
booked for Tophet, if he set out to.

So the special train from Boston brought the "house-party" down, and our
two-seated buggy brought Beriah and Eben over. They didn't have anyt