nce Congressman Atkins pulled up his. 'What in the world,
Cap'n Whittaker,' says I to him, 'do you want of box hedges? Homely
and stiff and funeral lookin'! I might have 'em around my grave in the
buryin' ground,' I says, 'but nowheres else.' 'All right, Angie,' says
he, 'you shall have 'em there; I'll cut some slips purpose for you.
It'll be a pleasure,' he says. Now ain't that crazy talk for a grown
man?"

Miss Phinney was not the only one in our village to question Captain
Cy Whittaker's sanity during the next few months. The majority of
our people didn't understand him at all. He was generally liked, for
although he had money, he did not put on airs, but he had his own way of
doing things, and they were not Bayport ways.

True to his promise, he had a squad of carpenters busy, on the
day following his arrival, tearing down the loathed piazza. These
carpenters, and more, were kept busy throughout that entire spring
and well into the summer. Then came painters and gardeners. The piazza
disappeared; a new picket fence, exactly like the old one torn down by
the Howeses, was erected; new shutters were hung; new windowpanes were
set; the roof was newly shingled. Captain Cy, Senior, had, in his day,
cherished a New England fondness for white and green paint; therefore
the new fence was white and the house was white and the blinds a
brilliant green. Rows of box hedge, the plants brought from Boston, were
set out on each side of the front walk. The Howes front-door bell--a
clamorous gong--was removed, and a glass knob attached to a spring bell
of the old-fashioned "jingle" variety took its place. An old-fashioned
flower garden--Cap'n Cy's mother had loved posies--was laid out on
the west lawn beyond the pear trees. All these changes the captain
superintended; when they were complete he turned his attention to
interior decoration.

And now Captain Cy proceeded to, literally, astonish the natives. Among
the Howes "improvements" were gilt wall papers and modern furniture for
the lower floor of the house. The furniture they had taken with them;
the wall paper had perforce been left behind. And the captain had every
scrap of that paper stripped from the walls, and the latter re-covered
with quaint, ugly, old-fashioned patterns, stripes and roses and
flowered sprays with impossible birds flitting among them. The Bassett
decorators has pasted the gilt improvement over the old Whittaker paper,
and it was the Whittaker paper that