r steams up it on a still
summer's day must enjoy a surprise that will not easily be effaced from
his recollection.

At the period of our story, indeed, the picture was far from being so
complete or rich: but even then were becoming manifest the germs of the
bustle and life which now pervade the place.

On one of the most beautiful points of the Sound peeped into view a
small one-storeyed house with two small-paned attic windows projecting
from its steep tiled roof, and with a pine-wood climbing the hillside
behind, which was the property of Captain Beck; and here, until, as he
proposed to do in a couple of years' time, he retired from the sea and
invested his fortune in the shipbuilding yard which he had in view, his
family generally took up their residence during the summer months.
Hither in the early part of this summer, too, they had repaired.

It was no life of idleness, though, which they lived out there: Madam
Beck always made work for everybody, and had her own spinning-wheel in
the sitting-room. Her step-son had his occupation on land, and as much
as he could do, as member of the coast commission. But he used generally
to come over on Saturdays in his pretty sail-boat and remain over
Sunday; and on that day, too, some one or other family of their
acquaintance in the town would make them an object for a pleasure party,
and would usually spend the afternoon with them.

Carl Beck was always in great force on these occasions. His brown face
and frank sailor bearing and good looks would have been sufficient in
themselves to make him a favourite with the ladies. But, in addition to
these claims upon their interest, he had been known to most of the
younger ones among them from his schoolboy days, when he used to come
home on leave as a cadet, and he seemed to enjoy particular confidential
relations with nearly every one of them, or, at all events, to be in
possession of some secret or other which only they two knew. They had
all kinds of jokes and expressions from their younger days which were
unintelligible to the rest; and what is vulgarly called "chaff" formed,
perhaps, the staple of his conversation with them, varied now and then
by a touch of sentiment, which was intended, by chance as it were, to
open up to them for a moment the real deeper nature which they might not
have suspected him of possessing. They used to twit him about his
inclination to stoutness, and he used to joke about it too, and say he
had t