Goody!" cried Cora, clapping her hands. "Let's ask him."

Ruth said nothing. She rather wished she might get out of the trip to Reef
Island without offending anybody. But that seemed impossible. She really
had seen all the hermits she cared to see!

She could not, however, be morose and absent-minded in a party of which
Cora Grimsby and Jennie Stone were the moving spirits. It was a gay crowd
that crossed the harbor in the _Stazy_ to land at a roughly built dock
under the high bluff of the wooded island.

"There's the hermit!" Cora cried, as they landed. "See him sitting on the
rock before the door of his cabin?"

"Right on the job," suggested Tom.

"No unlucky city fly shall escape that spider's web," cried Jennie.

He was a patriarchal looking man. His beard swept his breast. He wore
shabby garments, was barefooted, and carried a staff as though he were
lame or rheumatic.

"Dresses the part much better than our hermit does," Helen said, in
comment.

The man met the party from the _Stazy_ with a broad smile that displayed a
toothless cavity of a mouth. His red-rimmed eyes were moist looking, not
to say bleary. Ruth smelled a distinct alcoholic odor on his breath. A
complete drouth had evidently not struck this part of the State of Maine.

"Good day to ye!" said the hermit. "Some o' you young folks I ain't never
seed before."

"They are my friends," Cora hastened to explain, "and they come from Beach
Plum Point."

"Do tell! If you air goin' back to-night, better make a good v'y'ge of it.
We're due for a blow, I allow. You folks ain't stoppin' right on the
p'int, be ye?"

Ruth, to whom he addressed this last question, answered that they were,
and explained that there was a large camp there this season, and why.

"Wal, wal! I want to know! Somebody did say something to me about a gang
of movin' picture folks comin' there; but I reckoned they was a-foolin'
me."

"There is a good sized party of us," acknowledged Ruth.

"Wal, wal! Mebbe that fella I let my shack to will make out well, then,
after all. Warn't no sign of ye on the beach when I left three weeks ago".

"Did you live there on the point?" asked Ruth.

"Allus do winters. But the pickin's is better over here at the Harbor at
this time of year."

"And the man you left in your place? Where is your house on the point?"

The hermit "for revenue only" described the hut on the eastern shore in
which the other "hermit" lived. Ruth became much interes