lapping up my salt tears with evident relish.

When night came, I felt still more lonesome. My grandfather sat in
his arm-chair the greater part of the evening, reading the Rivermouth
Bamacle, the local newspaper. There was no gas in those days, and the
Captain read by the aid of a small block-tin lamp, which he held in one
hand. I observed that he had a habit of dropping off into a doze every
three or four minutes, and I forgot my homesickness at intervals in
watching him. Two or three times, to my vast amusement, he scorched the
edges of the newspaper with the wick of the lamp; and at about half
past eight o'clock I had the satisfactions--I am sorry to confess it was a
satisfaction--of seeing the Rivermouth Barnacle in flames.

My grandfather leisurely extinguished the fire with his hands, and Miss
Abigail, who sat near a low table, knitting by the light of an astral
lamp, did not even look up. She was quite used to this catastrophe.

There was little or no conversation during the evening. In fact, I do
not remember that anyone spoke at all, excepting once, when the Captain
remarked, in a meditative manner, that my parents "must have reached New
York by this time"; at which supposition I nearly strangled myself in
attempting to intercept a sob.

The monotonous "click click" of Miss Abigail's needles made me nervous
after a while, and finally drove me out of the sitting-room into the
kitchen, where Kitty caused me to laugh by saying Miss Abigail thought
that what I needed was "a good dose of hot-drops," a remedy she was
forever ready to administer in all emergencies. If a boy broke his
leg, or lost his mother, I believe Miss Abigail would have given him
hot-drops.

Kitty laid herself out to be entertaining. She told me several funny
Irish stories, and described some of the odd people living in the town;
but, in the midst of her comicalities, the tears would involuntarily
ooze out of my eyes, though I was not a lad much addicted to weeping.
Then Kitty would put her arms around me, and tell me not to mind it--that
it wasn't as if I had been left alone in a foreign land with no one to
care for me, like a poor girl whom she had once known. I brightened up
before long, and told Kitty all about the Typhoon and the old seaman,
whose name I tried in vain to recall, and was obliged to fall back on
plain Sailor Ben.

I was glad when ten o'clock came, the bedtime for young folks, and old
folks too, at the Nutter House. Alo