did
not seem to be any.

"I've been up to see my wife's cousin Jake Hallet's folks," he
explained, "and I thought sure I'd get left," and old Plunkett nodded
soberly. They did not sail for at least half an hour after this, and
Betty sat discreetly on the low cabin roof next the wharf all the time.
When they were out in the stream at last she could get a pretty view of
the town. There was some shipping farther down the shore, and some tall
steeples and beautiful trees and quaintly built warehouses; it was very
pleasant, looking back at it from the water.

A little past the middle of the afternoon they moved steadily up the
river. The men all sat together in a group at the stern, and appeared to
find a great deal to talk about. Old Mr. Plunkett may have thought that
Betty looked lonely, for after he waked for the second time he came over
to where she sat and nodded to her; so Betty nodded back, and then the
old man reached for her umbrella, which was very pretty, with a round
piece of agate in the handle, and looked at it and rubbed it with his
thumb, and gave it back to her. "Present to ye?" he asked, and Betty
nodded assent. Then old Plunkett went away again, but she felt a sense
of his kind companionship. She wondered whom she must pay for her
passage and how much it would be, but it was no use to ask so deaf a
fellow-passenger. He had put on a great pair of spectacles and was
walking round her trunk, apparently much puzzled by the battered labels
of foreign hotels and railway stations.

Betty thought that she had seldom seen half so pleasant a place as this
New England river. She kept longing that her father could see it, too.
As they went up from the town the shores grew greener and greener, and
there were some belated apple-trees still in bloom, and the farm-houses
were so old and stood so pleasantly toward the southern sunshine that
they looked as if they might have grown like the apple-trees and willows
and elms. There were great white clouds in the blue sky; the air was
delicious. Betty could make out at last that old Mr. Plunkett was the
skipper's father, that Captain Beck was an old shipmaster and a former
acquaintance of her own, and that the flour and some heavy boxes
belonged to one store-keeping passenger with a long sandy beard, and the
mowing-machine to the other, who was called Jim Foss, and that he was a
farmer. He was a great joker and kept making everybody laugh. Old Mr.
Plunkett laughed too, now