elly lived their simple
home life, and Bascom, the storekeeper and postmaster, talked
unceasingly when he could find a listener, and Deacon Oaks wondered why
"the grace o' God hadn't freed the land from stuns," no one ever came to
disturb its quietude. Every morning Uncle Terry, often accompanied by
Telly in a calico dress and sunbonnet, rowed out to pull his lobster
traps, and after dinner harnessed and drove to the head of the island to
meet the mail boat, then at eventide, after lighting his pipe and the
lighthouse lamp at about the same time, generally strolled over to
Bascom's to have a chat, while Telly made a call on the "Widder Leach,"
a misanthropic but pious protegee of hers, and Aunt Lissy read the
"Boston Journal." Once in about three weeks, according to weather, the
monotony of the village was disturbed by the arrival of the small
schooner owned jointly by Uncle Terry, Oaks, and Bascom, and which plied
between the Cape and Boston. Once in two weeks services were held as
usual in the little brown church, and as often the lighthouse tender
called and left coal and oil for Uncle Terry. Regularly on Thursday
evenings the few piously inclined, led by Deacon Oaks, gathered in the
church to sing hymns they repeated fifty-two times each year, listen to
a prayer by Oaks, that seldom varied in a single sentence, and heard
Auntie Leach thank the Lord for his "many mercies," though what they
were in her case it would be hard to tell, unless being permitted to
live alone and work hard to live at all was a mercy. The scattered
islanders and the handful whose dwellings comprised the Cape worked
hard, lived frugally, and were unconscious that all around them was a
rocky shore whose cliffs and inlets and beaches were so many poems of
picturesque and charming scenery.

This was Southport in summer, but in winter when the little harbor at
the Cape was ice-bound, the winding road to the head of the island
buried beneath drifts, and the people often for weeks at a time
absolutely cut off from communication with the rest of the world, it was
a place cheerless in its desolation. Like so many woodchucks then, the
residents kept within doors, or only stirred out to cut wood, fodder the
stock, and shovel paths so that the children could go to school. The
days were short and the evenings long, and to get together and spend
hours in labored conversation the only pastime. It was one of those long
evenings, and when Aunt Lissy and Telly