he car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the
maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its
socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms
to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had
jolted forward on the beginning of its run.

That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and
finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his
vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where
he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he
were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard
vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did
not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he
used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had
brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of
the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at
Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.

He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard
man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving
up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They
accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth
girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in
literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just
the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a
romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their
Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather
vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he
did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he
had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupe from the
restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.

He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and
left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to
bid him go through Charles Street.

The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and
naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come
into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded
structure, with its stately _porte-cochere_, where his driver proposed
to leave him, instead of the f