rayers, the
boys, who had learned from Captain Jeb that they had a couple of hours
still on their hands, proceeded to explore the quaint old town, with its
steep, narrow streets, where no traffic policemen were needed; for neither
street cars nor automobiles were allowed to intrude.

In the far long ago, Beach Cliff had been a busy and prosperous seaport
town. The great sailing vessels of those days, after long and perilous
voyage, made harbor there; the old shipmasters built solid homes on the
island shores; its merchants grew rich on the whaling vessels, that went
forth to hunt for these monsters of the great deep, and came back laden
with oil and blubber and whalebone and ambergris. But all this was changed
now. Steam had come to supplant the white wings that had borne the old
ships on their wide ocean ways. As Captain Jeb said, "the airth had taken
to spouting up ile," and made the long whale hunts needless and
unprofitable. But, though it had died to the busy world of commerce and
trade, the quaint old island town had kept a charm all its own, that drew
summer guests from far and near.

Dud and Jim made for the resident streets, where old Colonial mansions
stood amid velvety lawns, and queer little low-roofed houses were buried
in vines and flowers. But Dan and Freddy kept to the shore and the cliff,
where the old fishermen had their homes, and things were rough and
interesting. They stopped at an old weather-beaten house that had in its
low windows all sorts of curious things--models of ships and boats, odd
bits of pottery, rude carvings, old brasses and mirrors,--the flotsam and
jetsam from broken homes and broken lives that had drifted into this
little eddy.

The proprietor, a bent and grizzled old man, who stood smoking at the
door, noticed the young strangers.

"Don't do business on Sundays; but you can step in, young gentlemen, and
look about you. 'Twon't cost you a cent: and I've things you won't see
any-whar else on this Atlantic coast,--brass, pottery, old silver, old
books, old papers, prints of rare value and interest. A Harvard professor
spent two hours the other day looking over my collection."

"Is it a museum?" asked Freddy politely, as he and Dan peered doubtful
over the dusky threshold.

"Wal, no, not exactly; though it's equal to that, sonny. Folks call this
here Jonah's junk-shop,--Jonah being my Christian name. (I ain't never had
much use for any other.) I've been here forty years, and my