hen recedes, ever coming
yet ever vanishing.

CHAPTER XVII.

TWO MUD-TURTLES.

"There goes a man drunk, Aunt Stanshy."

Aunt Stanshy said nothing, but continued to thump away on her
ironing-board.

"He is going down the lane, aunty."

Aunt Stanshy heard Charlie, but she said nothing, only ironing away
steadily as ever. Charlie heard her sigh once, or thought he did.

"Did you speak, aunty?"

"Me, child? Why, no!"

Charlie continued to look out of the window that fronted the narrow lane.
The drunken man was not a very attractive object. Then it was a dark,
lowery, and rainy day in the latter part of November. The streets were
muddy, fences damp and clammy to the touch. Over the river hung a gray,
cheerless fog. To such a day a staggering drunkard could not be said to
contribute a cheering feature, and it was no wonder that Aunt Stanshy
cared little to see him. Soon after this, Charlie went out into the barn.
It had a deserted look, especially up in the chamber.

"No White Shields here now," he said, mournfully.

That fastened window, too, the nail driven securely above the hook and
staple, had a mournful look to Charlie's soul. He remembered the story
that Simes Badger had told him about this window and the closed door
below.

"I wonder if they will ever be open," thought Charlie.

He remembered the river view that was possible from the "cupelo" above,
and he said, "Guess I'll climb up and see what the weather is." Charlie
was not a very experienced weather-observer, but he thought he would like
to obtain a wider outlook than the lane window had afforded him. He
planted an eye between the slats of his watch-tower and then looked off.
The view was neither extensive nor varied, mostly one of mud-flats. A
thick fog had come from the sea and stretched like a curtain across the
mouth of the dock in the rear of Aunt Stanshy's premises. The low tide had
left in the dock a stretch of ugly flats, out of which stuck various
family relics like pots and kettles, then pots and kettles again, and
finally a dead cat. Charlie saw several tall chimneys in the neighborhood,
but the buildings they decorated had been covered by the fog, and the
chimneys looked like a vessel's masts from which the hull had drifted
away, leaving them standing in depths of river-mud. Toward the sea it was
only mist, mist that looked extensive enough to reach as far as London,
whose fog-lovers would have welcomed it. Did the dock, the t