asked the girl gayly. "Who
would refuse such a generous offer?"

"I knowed you'd see it that way," said Prudence happily.

"But there might have been circumstances we could not foresee,"
Cap'n Ira said. "You--you didn't have many friends where you was
stopping?"

"No _real_ friends."

"Well, there is a difference, I cal'late. No young man, o' course,
like Tunis Latham, for instance?"

"Now, Ira!" admonished Prudence.

But Ida May only laughed.

"Nobody half as nice as Captain Latham," she said with honesty.

"Well, I cal'late he would be hard to beat, even here on the Cape,"
agreed the inquisitive old man.

He took a pinch of snuff and prepared to enjoy it. Suddenly
remembering his wife's nervousness, he shouted in a high key:

"Looker--out--Prue! _A-choon!_"

"Good--Well, ye did warn me that time, Ira, for a fact. But if I
had a cake in the oven 'stead of biscuit, I guess 'twould have fell
flat with that shock. I do wish you could take snuff quiet. Look an'
see, will you, Ida May, if those biscuits are burning?"

The girl opened the oven door to view briefly the two pans of
biscuit.

"They are not even brown yet, Aunt Prue. But soon."

"The creamed fish is done. I hope you like salt fish, Ida May?"

"I adore it!"

"Lucky you do," put in Cap'n Ira. "I can't say that I think it is
actually 'adorable.' But then, I ain't been eatin' it as a steady
shore diet much more'n sixty-five year."

"Don't you run down your victuals, Ira," said his wife.

"No, I don't cal'late to. But if I may be allowed to express my
likes and dislikes, I got to be honest and say that there's victuals
I eat that would have suited me better for a steady diet than
pollack and potatoes. And now we don't even have the potatoes,
'cause we can't raise 'em no more."

"But you have land. I see a garden," said Ida May briskly.

"Yes, it's land," said Cap'n Ira, in the same pessimistic way. "But
it ain't had a coat of shack fish for three years and this spring
not much seaweed. Besides that, after the potatoes are planted, who
is to hoe 'em and knock the bugs off?"

"Oh!" commented Ida May, with a small shudder.

He grinned broadly.

"There's a whole lot o' work to farming. I'd rather plow the sea
than plow the land, and that's no idle jest! Never could see how a
man could be downright honest when he says he likes to putter with a
garden. Why, it's working in one place all the time. When he looks
up from his job, there's the s