l
fragrance of salt sea and sweet flowers which I shall always have in my
mind's nostrils (why can't one have nostrils as well as eyes in one's
mind?) when I think of this place. And oh, I nearly forgot to tell you
about that _great_ feature, the museum and library, though we spent two
hours browsing in it, and "musing" (appropriate word for Easthampton!)
by the fountain in its garden. They've made the building look as
Elizabethan as though it had been shipped from Surrey; and its books and
pictures and relics are _fascinating_. So are the girls who are the
guardians of the place. They are the only young things there.

Luckily it was the one day of the week when people are allowed to go
inside the quaintest of the houses in the village (I _hate_ calling it a
_town_, though perhaps I ought to), the wee bit hoosie where John Howard
Payne lived. If you don't know that he wrote "Home, Sweet Home," you
ought to. It's the dearest little gray nest you can imagine, and I envy
the people who own it. No wonder J. H. P. was able to write such a song!
But how surprised he'd have been, all the same, if any one had told him
that a hundred years or so later crowds of pilgrims would come to
worship at that humble shrine!

We had time, after the Payne house, to undertake an adventure. Not that
we knew it was going to be an adventure when we started. Jack was
responsible for it, he having inflamed his mind by reading overmuch
about Montauk Indians and their virtues. Their great stronghold used to
be at Montauk Point, a kind of peninsula at the far eastern end of the
Island, and Jack wanted to see it. The people at the hotel told us we
should find a bad road for motors, but what was that to us, who call
ourselves pioneers in the motor world? Bad roads were not in the bright
lexicon of our youth, and of course the rest of the party wouldn't back
out when that was our attitude. Besides, Mr. Goodrich, the Garden of the
Gods giant, put money in an enterprise which expects that ocean liners
will some day dock at Montauk Point and so save many hours. He was as
keen in his way as Jack was in _his_, though he cared not that brave
Montauk Indians had built their places of refuge there in palisaded
inclosures.

Well, we set forth gaily, none of us knowing what we were in for, unless
it was Peter Storm. I began to think, after certain events, that he must
have pushed his inquiries farther than we did, or else, in that lurid
past of his, one of th