such a wicked place--seems onsafer ez you get old. New
England's the best place in the world to die in, and so he thought.

"Howsumever, she kep' a-sendin' him money and things; and one day ther
came this here box--I've often heard my gran'mother tell how she
looked on when 't wuz opened, and this picter turned out. Gran'ma wuz
only a little thing, and she didn't know what to make of it all; for
the Cap'n, he cried like a baby when he seen it. He had it taken up
right away to his room (thet's whar you're a-sleepin') and hung over
the mantel jest whar he could see it from his bed. Thar it stayed ez
long ez he stayed on airth, and when he lay a-dyin',--He died, you
know, in that very bed you're a-sleepin' in--only o' course the
mattress is new--the old one wuz a feather-bed. My gran'mother wuz
with him at the end, and she said he stretched out his arms to the
pictur, same ez ef 't ed been his niece herself; and he sort o' cried
out, 'God bless you, Ruth! I wish I'd 'a' understood you better!'
Wuzn't that a queer thing for him to say when he wuz a-dyin'?"

"Poor Ruth!" murmured Flint, with that placid, mild melancholy born of
a sad story heard under comfortable circumstances. His fancy travelled
back to the damsel in her Quaker dress, and he fell to wondering if
the garb had been donned, with innocent hypocrisy, to please her old
uncle, or if she always wore it in her faraway new home.

When he had got so far in his musings, his host recalled him to the
present by continuing, "I dunno ez we've a very good claim to the
pictur; but there ain't no heirs turned up, so ez the Cap'n wuz a
little behind in his board bills, we sort o' kep' it."

Flint sat drumming with his fingers on the table, while his host still
maundered on after the fashion of old age, which has so few topics
that it cannot drop them with the light touch-and-go of youth.

Flint had already firmly determined that he would be the possessor of
that portrait; but he was too shrewd to make any further advances now.

Instead, he turned again to the subject of "The Aquidneck," and,
rising, made his way to the porch, where he almost walked over a
speckled hen so nearly a match for the floor that his near-sighted
eyes failed to perceive her, paying as little heed to her clucking and
fluttering as he bestowed upon the smiles of a girl who stood in the
doorway and moved, with conspicuous civility as he passed. He stalked
around to the corner of the porch where stoo