ll see," said Captain Bennett; "time will tell."

*****

There are many little farms along the New England sea-board, which the
currents of life, diverted from ancient channels, have left one side,
pleasant and homelike often, but of small money value. The Callender
place was such a farm.

It lay a mile from the village, in a hamlet of half-a-dozen dwellings.
There was a substantial house, with four large rooms below, besides an
L kitchen, and above, two sunny chambers, each with a dormer and a gable
window. From the front fence projected, for a hitching-post, a Minerva,
carved from wood,--a figure-head washed up years before from the wreck
of a brig with the bodies of the crew.

The house was on a little elevation, and looked across the road, near
which it stood, and over a sloping field or two, to sea. From the
windows you could count the sail in the North Channel, and look down the
coast and follow with the eye the long, low curving line of shore until
at Indian Point it vanished; or look up shore ten miles to where
the coast-line ended in a bold, wooded headland, which seemed, by a
perpetual mirage, to bear foliage so lofty as to show daylight through
beneath the branches. At night you could see the flash of the revolving
light on Windmill Rock, and the constant rays from the lightship on
the Rips. So that by day or night you could never be lonesome, unless,
perhaps, on some thick night, when you could see no light, and could
only hear a grating knell from the bell-buoy, and could seem to see,
through the white darkness, the waters washing over its swaying barrel.

There was a good-sized boarded barn, well shingled on the roof, with
hay-mows, and with room for two or three cows and a horse and a wagon,
and with wide doors "fore and aft," as the neighbors put it; through its
big front door you could look out to sea. Then there were twenty acres
of land, including a wood-lot which could be thinned out every year to
give one all his fire-wood, and what was cut would hardly be missed.

Such was the place which, on the death of the Widow Callender, had been
offered for sale for eight hundred dollars. For months it had stood
empty, stormed by all the sea-winds, lit up by the sun, when at last an
unexpected buyer had turned up in David Prince.

*****

It was a happy Sunday that he passed with his little family at the new
home. They went all over the house again and again, and looked from
every window, and planned