uality and the best parlor had more charms for him.
In that parlor were the trophies of Captain Shadrach's seafaring
days--whales' teeth, polished and with pictures of ships upon them; the
model of a Chinese junk; a sea-turtle shell, flippers, head and all,
exactly like a real turtle except, as Mary-'Gusta said, 'it didn't have
any works'; a glass bottle with a model of the bark Treasure Seeker
inside; an Eskimo lance with a bone handle and an ivory point; a
cocoanut carved to look like the head and face of a funny old man; a
Cuban machete; and a set of ivory chessmen with Chinese knights and
kings and queens, all complete and set out under a glass cover.

The junk and the lance and the machete and the rest had a fascination
for Jimmie, as they would have had for most boys, but for him the
parlor's strongest temptation lay in the fact that the children were
forbidden to play there. Zoeth and the Captain, having been brought up
in New England families of the old-fashioned kind, revered their parlor
as a place too precious for use. They, themselves, entered it not
oftener than three times a year, and Isaiah went there only when he
felt inclined to dust, which was not often. Shadrach had exhibited its
treasures to the children one Sunday morning when Zoeth was at church,
but he cautioned them against going there by themselves. "You'd be
liable to break somethin'," he told them, "and some of them things in
there you couldn't buy with money. They've been brought from pretty much
everywheres in creation, those things have."

But, in spite of the warning, or because of it, Jimmie was, as Isaiah
would have said, "possessed" to visit that parlor. He coaxed and teased
and dared Mary-'Gusta to take advantage of the steward's stepping out of
the house or being busy in the kitchen to open that parlor door and go
in with him and peep at and handle the treasures. Mary-'Gusta protested,
but young Bacheldor called her a coward and declared he wouldn't play
with cowards and 'fraid-cats, so rather than be one of those detestable
creatures she usually swallowed her scruples and followed the tempter.
It was a risk, of course, but a real adventure; and, like many
adventurers, the pair came to grief. They took David into the parlor and
the cat wriggled from its owner's arms, jumped upon the table, knocked
the case containing the chessmen to the floor, and not only broke the
glass but decapitated one of the white knights.

Even the mild Mr.