their
thole-pins disappeared, their milk bottles vanished, Mr. Appleboy's fish
lines acquired a habit of derangement equaled only by barbed-wire
entanglements, and his clams went bad! But these things might have been
borne had it not been for the crowning achievement of her malevolence,
the invasion of the Appleboys' cherished lawn, upon which they lavished
all that anxious tenderness which otherwise they might have devoted to a
child.

It was only about twenty feet by twenty, and it was bordered by a hedge
of moth-eaten privet, but anyone who has ever attempted to induce a
blade of grass to grow upon a sand dune will fully appreciate the
deviltry of Mrs. Tunnygate's malignant mind. Already there was a horrid
rent where Tunnygate had floundered through at her suggestion in order
to save going round the pathetic grass plot which the Appleboys had
struggled to create where Nature had obviously intended a floral vacuum.
Undoubtedly it had been the sight of Mrs. Appleboy with her small
watering pot patiently encouraging the recalcitrant blades that had
suggested the malicious thought to Mrs. Tunnygate that maybe the
Appleboys didn't own that far up the beach. They didn't--that was the
mockery of it. Like many others they had built their porch on their
boundary line, and, as Mrs. Tunnygate pointed out, they were claiming to
own something that wasn't theirs. So Tunnygate, in daily obedience to
his spouse, forced his way through the hedge to the beach, and daily the
wrath of the Appleboys grew until they were driven almost to
desperation.

Now when the two former friends sat fishing in their skiffs they either
contemptuously ignored one another or, if they "Huh-Huhed!" at all the
"Huhs!" resembled the angry growls of infuriated beasts. The worst of it
was that the Appleboys couldn't properly do anything about it. Tunnygate
had, as Mrs. Tunnygate sneeringly pointed out, a perfect legal right to
push his way through the hedge and tramp across the lawn, and she didn't
propose to allow the Appleboys to gain any rights by proscription,
either. Not much!

Therefore, when Mr. Appleboy addressed to Mr. Tunnygate the remarks with
which this story opens, the latter insolently replied in words, form or
substance that Mr. Appleboy could go to hell. Moreover, as he went by
Mr. Appleboy he took pains to kick over a clod of transplanted sea
grass, nurtured by Mrs. Appleboy as the darling of her bosom, and
designed to give an air of veri