they suddenly forgot
their roles; they squealed with pleasure and patted each other's
shoulders fondly. For simultaneously they had discovered the surprises.
In Mother's suit-case, inside her second-best boots, Father had hidden
four slender beribboned boxes of the very best chocolate peppermints;
while in Father's seemly nightgown was a magnificent new mouth-organ.

Father was an artist on the mouth-organ. He could set your heart
prancing with the strains of "Dandy Dick and the Candlestick." But his
old mouth-organ had grown wheezy. Now he sat down and played softly till
their tiny inside state-room was filled with a tumbling chorus of happy
notes.

When Mother was asleep in the lower berth and Father was believed to be
asleep in the upper he slipped on his coat and trousers and
kitten-footed out of the state-room to a dark corner of the deck. For,
very secretly, Father was afraid of the water. He who had insouciantly
reassured Mother had himself to choke down the timorous speculations of
a shop-bound clerk. While the sun was fair on the water and there were
obviously no leviathans nor anything like that bearing down upon them he
was able to conceal his fear--even from himself. But now that he didn't
have to cheer Mother, now that the boat rolled forward through a black
nothingness, he knew that he was afraid. He sat huddled, and remembered
all the tales he had heard of fire and collision and reefs. He vainly
assured himself that every state-room was provided with an automatic
sprinkler. He made encouraging calculations as to the infrequency of
collisions on the Sound, and scoffed at himself, "Why, the most shipping
there could be at night would be a couple of schooners, maybe a
torpedo-boat." But dread of the unknown was on him.

Father went through this spasm of solitary fear each first night of
vacation. It wasn't genuine fear. It was the growing-pain of freedom.
The cricket who chirped so gaily when he was with Mother was also a
weary man, a prisoner of daily routine. He had to become free for
freedom.

Laughingly, then bitterly, he rebuked himself for fear. And presently he
was bespelled by the wonder of the unknown. Beyond the water through
which they slid, black and smooth as polished basalt, he saw a
lighthouse winking. From his steamer time-table he learned that it must
be Great Gull Island light. Great Gull Island! It suggested to him
thunderous cliffs with surf flung up on beetling rock, screaming gulls,