gether too much
about his business and that of Cap'n Abe. He told Louise before night:

"I tell you what, Abe's got the best of it! If I'd knowed I was goin'
to be picked to pieces by a lot of busybodies the way I be, I'd never
agreed to stay by the ship till Abe got back. No, sir! These folks
around here are the beatenest I ever see."

Yet Louise noticed that he seemed able to hold his own with the curious
ones. His tongue was quite as nimble as Cap'n Abe's had been. On the
day of her arrival, Lou Grayling had believed she would be amused at
Cardhaven. Ere the second twenty-four hours of her stay were rounded
out, she knew she would be.

CHAPTER VIII

SOMETHING ABOUT SALT WATER TAFFY

During the day Cap'n Amazon and Amiel Perdue carried Louise's trunks
upstairs and into the storeroom, handy to her own chamber. It seems
Cap'n Amazon had not brought his own sea chest; only a "dunnage bag,"
as he called it.

"But there's plenty of Abe's duds about," he said; "and we're about of
a size."

When Louise went to unpack her trunks she found a number of things in
the storeroom more interesting even than her own pretty summer frocks.
There were shells, corals, sea-ivory--curios, such as are collected by
seamen the world over. Cap'n Abe was an indefatigable gatherer of such
wares. There was a green sea chest standing with its lid wide open,
tarred rope handles on its ends, that may have been around the world a
score of times. It was half filled with old books.

All the dusty, musty volumes in the chest seemed to deal with the sea
and sea-going. Many of them, long since out of print and forgotten,
recounted strange and almost unbelievable romances of nautical
life--stories of wrecks, fires, battles with savages and pirates,
discoveries of lone islands and marvelous explorations in lands which,
since the date of publication, have become semi-civilized or altogether
so.

Here were narratives of men who had sailed around the world in tiny
craft like Captain Slocum; stories of seamen who had become chiefs of
cannibal tribes, like the famous Larry O'Brien; several supposedly
veracious narratives of the survivors of the Bounty; stories of Arctic
and Antarctic discovery and privation. There were also several
scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings of nautical wonders--many of
these clipped from New Bedford and Newport papers which at one time
were particularly rich in whalers' yarns.

Interested in skim