mitted that it was quicker. "But we
used to see the pheasants fly up from the bushes, and the ducks from
the pools, and now they are gone before we can get our eyes on them."

Becky was not in a captious mood. The moor was before her, rising and
falling in low unwooded hills, amber with dwarf goldenrod, red with the
turning huckleberry, purple with drying grasses; green with a thousand
lovely growing things still unpainted by the brush of autumn. The
color was almost unbelievably gorgeous. Even the pools by the roadside
were almost unbelievably blue, as if the water had been dyed with
indigo, and above all was that incredible blue sky----!

Then out of the distance clear cut like cardboard the houses lifted
themselves above the horizon, with the sea a wall to the right, and to
the left, across the moor, the Sankaty lighthouse, white and red with
the sun's rays striking across it.

They entered the village between rows of pleasant informal residences,
many of them closed until another season; they passed the tennis
courts, and came to the post-office, with its flag flying. The 'bus
stopped, and they found Tristram waiting for them.

"Tristram" is an old name in Nantucket. There was a Tristram among the
nine men who had purchased the Island from Thomas Mayhew in 1659 for
"30 pounds current pay and two beaver hats." The present Tristram wore
the name appropriately. Fair-haired and tall, not young but towards
the middle-years, strong with the strength of one who lives
out-of-doors in all weathers, browned with the wind and sun, blue-eyed,
he called no man master, and was the owner of his own small acres.

Like the Admiral, he gave himself up for two months of the year to the
summer people. If his association with them was a business rather than
a social affair, it was, none the less, interesting. The occupation of
Nantucket by "off-islanders" was a matter of infinite speculation and
amusement. Into the serenity of his life came restless men and women
who golfed and swam and rode and danced, who chafed when it rained, and
complained of the fog, who seemed endlessly trying to get something out
of life and who were endlessly bored, who wondered how Tristram could
stand the solitudes and who pitied him.

Tristram knew that he did not need their pity. He had a thousand
things that they did not have. He was never bored, and he was too busy
to manufacture amusements. There were always things happening on the
is