on the previous evening. The Phipps
house was a story and a half cottage, of the regulation Cape Cod type,
with a long "L" and sheds connecting it with a barn and chicken yards.
The house was spotlessly white, with blinds conventionally green, as
most New England houses are. There was a white fence shutting it off
from the road, the winding, narrow road which even yet held puddles
and pools of mud in its hollows, souvenirs of the downpour of the night
before. Across the road, perhaps a hundred yards away, was the long,
brown--and now of course bleak--broadside of the Restabit Inn, its
veranda looking lonesome and forsaken even in the brilliant light of
day. Behind it and beyond it were rolling hills, brown and bare, except
for the scattered clumps of beach-plum and bayberry bushes. There were
no trees, except a grove of scrub pine perhaps a mile away. Between the
higher hills and over the tops of the lower ones Galusha caught glimpses
of the sea. In the opposite direction lay a little cluster of roofs,
with a church spire rising above them. He judged this to be East
Wellmouth village.

The road, leading from the village, wound in and out between the hills,
past the Restabit Inn and the Phipps homestead until it ended at another
clump of buildings; a house, with ells and extensions, several other
buildings and sheds, and a sturdy white and black lighthouse. He was
leaning upon the fence rail peering through his spectacles when Primmie
came up behind him.

"That's a lighthouse you're lookin' at, Mr. Bangs," she observed, with
the air of one imparting valuable information.

Galusha started; he had not heard her coming.

"Eh? Oh! Yes, so I--ah--surmised," he said.

"Hey? What did you do?"

"I say I thought it was a lighthouse."

"'Tis. Ever see one afore, have you?"

Galusha admitted that he had seen a lighthouse before. "Kind of
interestin' things, ain't they? You know I never realized till I come
down here to live what interestin' things lighthouses was. There's so
much TO 'em, you know, ain't there?"

"Why--ah--is there?"

"I should say there was. I don't mean the tower part, though that's
interestin' of itself, with them round and round steps--What is it Miss
Martha said folks called 'em? Oh, yes, spinal stairs, that's it. I never
see any spinal stairs till I come here. They don't have 'em up to North
Mashpaug. That's where I used to live, up to North Mashpaug. Ever been
to North Mashpaug, Mr. Bangs?"

"