he very
first fight they had George pretty near licked the stuffin' out of John,
so I've decided to change the names around. That ought to fix it; don't
you think so, ma'am?"

On the seventeenth the High Cliff House was formally opened. It was
much too early to expect "summer" boarders, but there were three of the
permanent variety who had already engaged rooms. Of these the first was
Caleb Hammond, an elderly widower, and retired cranberry grower, whose
wife had died fifteen years before and who had been "boarding around" in
Wellmouth Centre and Trumet ever since. Caleb was fairly well-to-do and
although he had the reputation of being somewhat "close" in many matters
and "sot" in his ways, he was a respected member of society. He selected
a room on the second floor--not a front room, but one on the side
looking toward the Colfax estate. The room on the other side, across the
hall, was taken by Miss Rebecca Timpson, who had taught the "upstairs"
classes in the Wellmouth school ever since she was nineteen, a
considerable period of time.

The large front rooms, those overlooking the bluff and the sea, Thankful
had intended reserving for guests from the city, but when Mr. Heman
Daniels expressed a wish to engage and occupy one of them, that on the
left of the hall, she reconsidered and Mr. Daniels obtained his desire.
It was hard to refuse a personage like Mr. Daniels anything. He was not
an elderly man; neither was he, strictly speaking, a young one. His age
was, perhaps, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and he was
East Wellmouth's leading lawyer, in fact its only one.

Heman was a bachelor and rather good-looking. That his bachelorhood was
a matter of choice and not necessity was a point upon which all of East
Wellmouth agreed. He was a favorite with the ladies, most of them, and,
according to common report, there was a rich widow in Bayport who
would marry him at a minute's notice if he gave the notice. So far,
apparently, he had not given it. He was a "smart" lawyer, everyone said
that, and it is probable that he himself would have been the last to
deny the accusation. He was dignified and suave and gracious, also
persuasive when he chose to be.

He had been boarding with the Holts, but, like the majority of the hotel
lodgers and "mealers," was very willing to change. The location of the
High Cliff House was, so he informed Thankful, the sole drawback to its
availability as a home for him.

"If a b