a dollar for the trouble of it, to say nothing of
the blessing upon your own soul. Were you ever at Mass?"

"Never," answered Captain Jeb.

"Ah, God help you, poor man!" said Brother Bart. "Sure we never know our
own blessings till we talk with them that's left in the darkness. But it's
not too late for the grace of Heaven to reach you yet. Never been to Mass!
Well, well, well!" Brother Bart shook his head, and, as if unable to cope
with such hopeless religious dearth, relapsed into silence.

"Is it much further to Killykinick?" asked Dan, who, with shining eyes had
been taking in all this novel experience. "Looks like we're heading out to
nowhere."

The "Sary Ann," with the wind full in her sail, seemed bearing off into
sunlit distance, where sky and sea met. There was a faint, shadowy line to
the left; and just beyond, a dim pencil point pierced the cloudless blue.

"That's a lighthouse, isn't it?" asked Jim, who had a sailor's eye.

"Yes," growled Captain Jeb, his leathery face darkening. "Why they wanted
to set up that consarned thing just across from Killykinick, I don't know.
Hedn't we been showing a light thar for nigh onto fifty years? But some of
these know-alls come along and said it wasn't the right kind; it oughter
blink. And they made the old captain pull down the light that he had been
burning steady and true, and the Government sot up that thar newfangled
thing a flashing by clockwork on Numbskull Nob. It did make the old man
hot, sure. 'Shet the window, mate,' he said to me when he was dying and
wanted air badly. 'I can't go off in peace with that devilish thing of
Numbskull Nob a winking at me.' Duck Agin, all hands! 'Sary Ann' swings
around here. Thar's Killykinick to starboard!"

And all hands "ducked" as rope and canvas rattled under Captain Jeb's
guiding hand; and the "Sary Ann" swept from her dancing course to the
boundless blue towards the shadowy line and dim pencil point now growing
into graceful lighthouse and rocky shore. Numbskull Nob, jutting up from a
hidden reef, over which a line of white-capped breakers was booming
thunderously, seemed to justify the presence of the modern light that
warned off closer approach to the island; for the stretch of water that
lay between was a treacherous shoal where many a good ship had stranded in
years gone by, when Killykinick was only a jagged ledge of rock where the
sea birds nested and man had no place. But things had changed now. A rude
but stu