where they lived and laboured, and a dull
portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
which they seldom thought of.

Some wives of the village, it is true, had learned to let lodgings, and
others to keep shops. The doors of these latter places were formed of an
upper hatch, usually kept open, and a lower hatch, with a bell attached,
usually kept shut. Whenever a stranger went in, he would hear a
whispering of astonishment from a back room, after which a woman came
forward, looking suspiciously at him as an intruder, and advancing slowly
enough to allow her mouth to get clear of the meal she was partaking of.
Meanwhile the people in the back room would stop their knives and forks
in absorbed curiosity as to the reason of the stranger's entry, who by
this time feels ashamed of his unwarrantable intrusion into this hermit's
cell, and thinks he must take his hat off. The woman is quite alarmed at
seeing that he is not one of the fifteen native women and children who
patronize her, and nervously puts her hand to the side of her face, which
she carries slanting. The visitor finds himself saying what he wants in
an apologetic tone, when the woman tells him that they did keep that
article once, but do not now; that nobody does, and probably never will
again; and as he turns away she looks relieved that the dilemma of having
to provide for a stranger has passed off with no worse mishap than
disappointing him.

A cottage which stood on a high slope above this townlet and its bay
resounded one morning with the notes of a merry company. Ethelberta had
managed to find room for herself and her young relations in the house of
one of the boatmen, whose wife attended upon them all. Captain Flower,
the husband, assisted her in the dinner preparations, when he slipped
about the house as lightly as a girl and spoke of himself as cook's mate.
The house was so small that the sailor's rich voice, developed by
shouting in high winds during a twenty years' experience in the coasting
trade, could be heard coming from the kitchen between the chirpings of
the children in the parlour. The furniture of this apartment consisted
mostly of the painting of a full-rigged ship, done by a man whom the
captain had specially selected for the purpose because he had been seven-
and-twenty years at sea before touching a brush, and thereby offered a
sufficient guarantee that he understood how to paint a vessel properly.

Be