ife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
"James used to behave himself quite well," Mrs. Parsons would say,
archly raising her eyebrows, "before Joe's time; but now there 's two
boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do
nothing with 'em. And then,"--with a mock gesture of despair,--"that
dog!"

IV.

While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain
that she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain
Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that
the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented
the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.

It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The
stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain
thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That
James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his
mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a
bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of
winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where
James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of
the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and
went in.

James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen
and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing
vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had
been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours.
His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her
hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room;
then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about
mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into the lean-to
wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn floor where
it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her
face in her apron, and burst into tears.

Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.

Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,--a man who gave a welcome,--a
rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was
James Parsons. He had a hom