for sympathy; "so that I've learned to depend so much on him,
more, I think, than on anybody else. Some boys when they're growing up
so, they feel independent and they answer you back short, but the older
he grew, the gentler he was to me, always, and if he had any trouble, it
never made him cross to me; and I think it's harder to see anybody so
than if they was cross, for he's quick in ways, I know, but when things
go real hard against him, he's patient."

"He ought not to know much about trouble yet," I answered hopefully, with
the consciousness of one who has fathomed all the mysteries of grief and
can yet speak gayly of the forlorn background.

"He doesn't know enough about the world, I'm afraid," said Mrs.
Cradlebow, and her eyes, fixed on my face, seemed to me to be looking
gently into my inmost heart. "He expects so much, and he never looks out
for himself. I wish he'd be content to go fishing with the other
boys--they always come back in the autumn--and not want to sail so far."

I was almost angry because of the embarrassment I felt under that clear
glance.

[Illustration: THE MEETING IN THE SCHOOL-HOUSE.
Scene from the Play.]

"Don't you think, Mrs. Cradlebow," I said nervously; "that young people
are never content until they find out the world for themselves?" It was
an interrogation, but it was sagely uttered.

"I know, I know," she said. "Perhaps it's best he should go." She spoke
very quietly and with uncommon composure of demeanor. She withdrew her
eyes from my face, but the smile trembled on her lips, and I knew that
her heart was breaking over the words, for Luther was her darling.

I wished, almost impatiently, for my own part, that it might all have
happened differently; that I might leave everything in Wallencamp just as
I had found it, so delightfully happy and peaceful it had seemed to me.
I could not bear, in looking back, to think of one face as wearing upon
it any unaccustomed grief. At all events, I felt that my thoughts had
been helplessly turned from their prescribed channel, and the fisherman's
letter remained from day to day still unanswered.

Meanwhile, winter was vanishing at the Cape. As salient points in its
quaint and cherished memory, I recall the frequent clamming excursions,
when we rattled own to the beach, at low-tide, in a cart whose groaning
members lacked every element of elasticity. Often there were as many as
sixteen persons in one cart, and the same number of hoes an