part to perfection; and it never occurred to any of them that a cat,
with kittens, could not possibly have left a widow behind her.

The ceremony was most impressive; the bereaved kittens were loud in
their grief; when, suddenly, the village-bell tolled for the death of an
old gentleman whom everybody loved, and the comedy became a tragedy. The
older children were conscience-stricken at the mummery, and they ran,
demoralized and shocked, into the house, leaving The Boy and the kittens
behind them. Jane Purdy tripped over her veil, and one of the kittens
was stepped on in the crush. But The Boy proceeded with the funeral.

When The Boy got as far as a room of his own, papered with scenes from
circus-posters, and peopled by tin soldiers, he used to play that his
bed was the barge _Mayflower_, running from Barrytown to the foot of
Jay Street, North River, and that he was her captain and crew. She made
nightly trips between the two ports; and by day, when she was not tied
up to the door-knob--which was Barrytown--she was moored to the handle
of the wash-stand drawer--which was the dock at New York. She never was
wrecked, and she never ran aground; but great was the excitement of The
Boy when, as not infrequently was the case, on occasions of sweeping,
Hannah, the up-stairs girl, set her adrift.

The _Mayflower_ was seriously damaged by fire once, owing to the
careless use, by a deck-hand, of a piece of punk on the night before the
Fourth of July; this same deck-hand being nearly blown up early the very
next morning by a bunch of fire-crackers which went off--by
themselves--in his lap. He did not know, for a second or two, whether
the barge had burst her boiler or had been struck by lightning!

[Illustration: JOE STUART]

Barrytown is the river port of Red Hook--a charming Dutchess County
hamlet in which The Boy spent the first summer of his life, and in which
he spent the better part of every succeeding summer for a quarter of a
century; and he sometimes goes there yet, although many of the names he
knows were carved, in the long-agoes, on the tomb. He always went up and
down, in those days, on the _Mayflower_, the real boat of that name,
which was hardly more real to him than was the trundle-bed of his
vivid, nightly imagination. They sailed from New York at five o'clock
P.M., an hour looked for, and longed for, by The Boy, as the very
beginning of summer, with all its delightful young charms; and they
arrived at th