e water. Every time I got my hand on him
he'd dart away again."

"Anybody on the beach, darlin'?"

"Not a soul except Meg and the sandsnipe."

CHAPTER V

CAPTAIN NAT'S DECISION

When Martha, with Meg at her heels, passed Ann Gossaway's cottage the
next morning on her way to the post-office--her daily custom--the
dressmaker, who was sitting in the window, one eye on her needle and
the other on the street, craned her head clear of the calico curtain
framing the sash and beckoned to her.

This perch of Ann Gossaway's was the eyrie from which she swept the
village street, bordered with a double row of wide-spreading elms and
fringed with sloping grassy banks spaced at short intervals by
hitching-posts and horse-blocks. Her own cottage stood somewhat nearer
the flagged street path than the others, and as the garden fences were
low and her lookout flanked by two windows, one on each end of her
corner, she could not only note what went on about the fronts of her
neighbors' houses, but much of what took place in their back yards.
From this angle, too, she could see quite easily, and without more than
twisting her attenuated neck, the whole village street from the
Cromartins' gate to the spire of the village church, as well as
everything that passed up and down the shadow-flecked road: which
child, for instance, was late for school, and how often, and what it
wore and whether its clothes were new or inherited from an elder
sister; who came to the Bronsons' next door, and how long they stayed,
and whether they brought anything with them or carried anything away;
the peddler with his pack; the gunner on his way to the marshes, his
two dogs following at his heels in a leash; Dr. John Cavendish's gig,
and whether it was about to stop at Uncle Ephraim Tipple's or keep on,
as usual, and whirl into the open gate of Cobden Manor; Billy Tatham's
passenger list, as the ricketty stage passed with the side curtains up,
and the number of trunks and bags, and the size of them, all indicative
of where they were bound and for how long; details of village life--no
one of which concerned her in the least--being matters of profound
interest to Miss Gossaway.

These several discoveries she shared daily with a faded old mother who
sat huddled up in a rocking-chair by the stove, winter and summer,
whether it had any fire in it or not.

Uncle Ephraim Tipple, in his outspoken way, always referred to these
two gossips as the "spiders.