e to sea when he run away from home."

Mr. Tidditt shook his head.

"No, no!" he said. "I was to home that year. Remember 'Whit'? Well, I
should say I did. He was a holy terror--yes, sir! Wan't no monkey shines
or didos cut up in this town that young Cy wan't into. Fur's that goes,
you and me was in 'em, too, Bailey. We was all holy terrors then. Young
ones nowadays ain't got the spunk we used to have."

His friend chuckled.

"That's so," he declared. "That's so. Whit was a good-hearted boy, too,
but full of the Old Scratch and as sot in his ways as his dad, and if
Cap'n Cy wan't sot, then there ain't no sotness. 'You'll go to college
and be a parson,' says the Cap'n. 'I'll go to sea and be a sailor, same
as you done,' says Whit. And he did, too; run away one night, took the
packet to Boston, and shipped aboard an Australian clipper. Cap'n Cy
didn't go after him to fetch him home. No, sir--ee! not a fetch. Sent
him a letter plumb to Melbourne and, says he: 'You've made your bed; now
lay in it. Don't you never dast to come back to me or your ma,' he says.
And Whit didn't, he wan't that kind."

"Pretty nigh killed the old lady--Whit's ma--that did," mused Asaph.
"She died a little spell afterwards. And the old man pined away, too,
but he never give in or asked the boy to come back. Stubborn as all
get-out to the end, he was, and willed the place, all he had left, to
them Howes folks. And a nice mess THEY made of it. Young Cy, he--"

"Young Cy!" interrupted Bailey. "We're always callin' him 'young Cy,'
and yet, when you come to think of it, he must be pretty nigh fifty-five
now; 'most as old as you and I be. Wonder if he'll ever come back here."

"You bet he won't!" was the oracular reply. "You bet he won't! From what
I hear he got to be a sea cap'n himself and settled down there in Buenos
Ayres. He's made all kinds of money, they say, out of hides and such.
What he ever bought his dad's old place for, _I_ can't see. He'll never
come back to these common, one-horse latitudes, now you mark my word on
that!"

It was a prophecy Mr. Tidditt was accustomed to make each year to the
crowd at the post office, when the receipt for the draft for taxes
caused him to wax reminiscent. The younger generation here in Bayport
regard their town clerk as something of an oracle, and this regard has
made Asaph a trifle vain and positive.

Bailey chuckled again.

"We WAS a spunky, dare-devil lot in the old days, wan't we, Ase?" he