of fishing-lines and coils of tarred twine, which made the place smell
like a forecastle, and a delightful smell it is--to those who fancy it.

Kitty didn't leave our service, but played housekeeper for both
establishments, returning at night to Sailor Ben's. He shortly added
a wherry to his worldly goods, and in the fishing season made a very
handsome income. During the winter he employed himself manufacturing
crab-nets, for which he found no lack of customers.

His popularity among the boys was immense. A jackknife in his expert
hand was a whole chest of tools. He could whittle out anything from a
wooden chain to a Chinese pagoda, or a full-rigged seventy-four a foot
long. To own a ship of Sailor Ben's building was to be exalted above
your fellow-creatures. He didn't carve many, and those he refused to
sell, choosing to present them to his young friends, of whom Tom Bailey,
you may be sure, was one.

How delightful it was of winter nights to sit in his cosey cabin, close
to the ship's stove (he wouldn't hear of having a fireplace), and listen
to Sailor Ben's yarns! In the early summer twilights, when he sat on
the door-step splicing a rope or mending a net, he always had a bevy of
blooming young faces alongside.

The dear old fellow! How tenderly the years touched him after this--all
the more tenderly, it seemed, for having roughed him so cruelly in other
days!

Chapter Seventeen--How We Astonished the Rivermouthians

Sailor Ben's arrival partly drove the New Orleans project from my brain.
Besides, there was just then a certain movement on foot by the Centipede
Club which helped to engross my attention.

Pepper Whitcomb took the Captain's veto philosophically, observing that
he thought from the first the governor wouldn't let me go. I don't think
Pepper was quite honest in that.

But to the subject in hand.

Among the few changes that have taken place in Rivermouth during the
past twenty years there is one which I regret. I lament the removal of
all those varnished iron cannon which used to do duty as posts at
the corners of streets leading from the river. They were quaintly
ornamental, each set upon end with a solid shot soldered into its mouth,
and gave to that part of the town a picturesqueness very poorly atoned
for by the conventional wooden stakes that have deposed them.

These guns ("old sogers" the boys called them) had their story, like
everything else in Rivermouth. When that everlasting l