ved.

Mrs. Montague shuddered, for the scene was too terrible to be recalled
with anything but anguish.

"Captain Bobtail had just told Emily and me a story about an Indian girl
who jumped off that same cliff; but I didn't believe a word of it,"
Grace began. "I stood up on a stone near the edge, and swung my arms,
for I was thinking just how the Indian girl looked, if she really did
jump off that cliff. Just then mother screamed, and frightened me. I
started back; but the stone I was standing on rolled over, and threw me
forward, so that I went down into the water head first."

"I thought the child was going to jump overboard," added Mrs. Montague,
with a strong tremor passing through her frame.

The details of the affair were repeated, and then all eyes were directed
at Little Bobtail, who was more concerned about the propriety of his
conduct at the table than about his deeds at Blank Island; but probably,
if he had fed himself with his knife, his admiring friends would
cheerfully have forgiven him. He found it more difficult to transfer
mashed potato from his plate to his mouth with the silver fork than it
was to dive off that cliff into the sea. When the pastry came on, it
was absolutely appalling to think of eating custard pie with a fork, and
he would rather have undertaken the feat of swimming around Blank
Island.

"You know I always shovel in custard pie with my knife," said he,
afterwards, in telling his mother about it; "but everybody else used a
fork, and so I had to."

But Bobtail magnified the trials and tribulations of that grand dinner
in the cabin of the Penobscot, for, by keeping his "weather eye" open,
he hardly sinned against any of the proprieties of polite society, and
some of the ladies even remarked how well he behaved for a poor boy. The
dinner was finished at last, and "it was a tip-top dinner, too," for
besides chowder and fried fish, there were roast beef and roast chicken,
boiled salmon, puddings, pies, and ice-cream. Perhaps Bobtail ate too
much for strict gentility, but he excused himself by declaring that not
only the stewards, but all the party, "kept making him eat more of the
fixins."

"When I got through that dinner, mother," said he, "I was just like a
foot-ball blown up for a game; and if the captain's trousers that I
wore hadn't been a mile too big for me, I couldn't have put myself
outside of half that feed."

After the dinner, which Bobtail will remember as long as he liv