im ought not to be
doin' his own cookin'--that is, 'f you can call it cookin. But then, of
course, 'tis cookin'--there's all kinds o' cookin'. I went cook myself,
when I was a boy."

After supper, Aunt Lyddy sat down to knit, and Joshua drew his chair up
to an open window, to smoke his pipe. In this vice Aunt Lyddy encouraged
him. The odor of Virginia tobacco was a sweet savor in her nostrils.
No breezes from Araby ever awoke more grateful feelings than did the
fragrance of Uncle Joshua's pipe. To Aunt Lyddy it meant quiet and
peace.

Susan and Eph sat down on the broad flag door-stone, and talked quietly
of the simple news of the neighborhood, and of the days when they used
to go to school, and come home, always together.

"I did n't much think then," said Eph, "that I should ever bring up
where I have, and get ashore before I was fairly out to sea!"

"Jehiel's schooner got ashore on the bar, years ago," said Susan, "and
yet they towed her off, and I saw her this morning, from my chamber
window, before sunrise, all sail set, going by to the eastward."

"I know what you mean," said Eph. "But here--I got mad once, and I
almost had a right to, and I can't get started again; I never shall.
I can get a living, of course; but I shall always be pointed out as a
jailbird, and could no more get any footing in the world than Portuguese
Jim."

Portuguese Jim was the sole professional criminal of the town,--a weak,
good-natured, knock-kneed vagabond, who stole hens, and spent every
winter in the House of Correction as an "idle and disorderly person."

Susan laughed outright at the picture. Eph smiled too, but a little
bitterly.

"I suppose it was more ugliness than anything else," he said, "that made
me come back here to live, where everybody knows I 've been in jail and
is down on me."

"They are not down on you," said Susan. "Nobody is down on you. It 's
all your own imagination. And if you had gone anywhere that you was a
stranger, you know that the first thing that you would have done would
have been to call a meeting and tell all the people that you had burned
down a man's barn and been in the State's-prison, and that you wanted
them all to know it at the start; and you wouldn't have told them why
you did it, and how young you was then, and how Eliphalet treated your
mother, and how you was going to pay him for all he lost Here, everybody
knows that side of it. In fact," she added, with a little twinkle in her
eye