f the grove by the Shore Lane were bright, vivid splashes of color
against the blue of the sky. At my right hand the yellow sand of the
bluff broke sharply down to the white beach and the waters of the
bay, now beginning to ebb. Across the bay the lighthouse at Crow Point
glistened with new paint and I could see a moving black speck, which I
knew was Ben Small, the keeper, busy whitewashing the fence beside
it. Down on the beach Zeb Kendrick was overhauling his dory. In the
distance, beyond the grove, I could hear the carpenters' hammers on the
roof of the big Atwater mansion, which was now the property of James
Colton, the New York millionaire, whose rumored coming to Denboro to
live had filled the columns of the country weekly for three months. The
quahaug boats were anchored just inside the Point; a clam digger was
wading along the outer edge of the sedge; a lobsterman was hauling his
pots in the channel; even the bluebird on the wild cherry stump had
a straw in his beak and was plainly in the midst of nest building.
Everyone had something to do and was doing it--everyone except Lute
Rogers and myself, the "birds of a feather." And even Lute was working
now, under compulsion.

Ordinarily the sight of all this industry would not have affected me. I
had seen it all before, or something like it. The six years I had spent
in Denboro, the six everlasting, idle, monotonous years, had had their
effect. I had grown hardened and had come to accept my fate, at first
rebelliously, then with more of Lute's peculiar kind of philosophy.
Circumstances had doomed me to be a good-for-nothing, a gentleman loafer
without the usual excuse--money--and, as it was my doom, I forced myself
to accept it, if not with pleasure, at least with resignation. And I
determined to get whatever pleasure there might be in it. So, when I saw
the majority of the human race, each with a purpose in life, struggling
to attain that purpose, I passed them by with my gun or fishing rod
on my shoulder, and a smile on my lips. If my remnant of a conscience
presumed to rise and reprove me, I stamped it down. It had no reasonable
excuse for rising; I wasn't what I was from choice.

But, somehow, on this particular morning, my unreasonable conscience was
again alive and kicking. Perhaps it was the quickening influence of the
spring which resurrected it; perhaps Luther's quotation from the remarks
of Captain Jedediah Dean had stirred it to rebellion. A man may know,