t. Long's it's round here somewheres I--why, I
know where 'tis and--and it's handy. See, don't you?"

The captain shook his head.

"Jed Winslow," he declared, "as I said to you just now you beat all
my goin' to sea. I can't make you out. When I see how you act
with money and business, and how you let folks take advantage of
you, then I think you're a plain dum fool. And yet when you bob up
and do somethin' like gettin' Leander Babbitt to volunteer and
gettin' me out of that row with his father, then--well, then, I'm
ready to swear you're as wise as King Solomon ever was. You're a
puzzle to me, Jed. What are you, anyway--the dum fool or King
Solomon?"

Jed looked meditatively over his spectacles. The slow smile
twitched the corners of his lips.

"Well, Sam," he drawled, "if you put it to vote at town meetin' I
cal'late the majority'd be all one way. But, I don't know"--; he
paused, and then added, "I don't know, Sam, but it's just as well
as 'tis. A King Solomon down here in Orham would be an awful
lonesome cuss."

CHAPTER III

Upon a late September day forty-nine years and some months before
that upon which Gabe Bearse came to Jed Winslow's windmill shop in
Orham with the news of Leander Babbitt's enlistment, Miss Floretta
Thompson came to that village to teach the "downstairs" school.
Miss Thompson was an orphan. Her father had kept a small drug
store in a town in western Massachusetts. Her mother had been a
clergyman's daughter. Both had died when she was in her 'teens.
Now, at twenty, she came to Cape Cod, pale, slim, with a wealth of
light brown hair and a pair of large, dreamy brown eyes. Her taste
in dress was peculiar, even eccentric, and Orham soon discovered
that she, herself, was also somewhat eccentric.

As a schoolteacher she was not an unqualified success. The
"downstairs" curriculum was not extensive nor very exacting, but it
was supposed to impart to the boys and girls of from seven to
twelve a rudimentary knowledge of the three R's and of geography.
In the first two R's, "readin' and 'ritin'," Miss Thompson was
proficient. She wrote a flowery Spencerian, which was beautifully
"shaded" and looked well on the blackboard, and reading was the
dissipation of her spare moments. The third "R," 'rithmetic, she
loathed.

Youth, even at the ages of from seven to twelve, is only too
proficient in learning to evade hard work. The fact that Teacher
took no delight in traveling the p