I had been picturing visions of being
invited to remain for tea, of my making witty remarks under Jake's
mono-syllabic applause, looking over the photo albums and listening in
raptures to Miss Grant's playing and singing. And I was sour as old
cider as I descended the veranda steps, soaking, as I was, with brine
and perspiration.

Jake was perfectly happy, however, and all admiration over Miss Grant's
physical demonstration.

"Gee! Miss," he exclaimed, in a sort of Klondike ecstasy, "but you're
some class at heavin' cargo. Guess, if you put on overalls and cut off
your hair, you could get a fifty-cents-an-hour job at pretty near any
wharf on the Pacific seaboard."

I could see that Jake's doubtful compliment was not exactly relished by
the lady. Nevertheless, she smiled on him so sweetly that he stood
grinning at her, and might still have been so standing had not I pulled
him to earth by the sleeve, three steps at a time.

CHAPTER XV

"Music Hath Charms--"

He left me at the wharf without a word. I went into the house, threw
off my dirty overalls and indulged in the luxury of a bath. Not a
salt-water apology for one,--a real, live, remove-the-dirt, soapy,
hot-water bath;--and it did me a world of good both mentally and bodily.

I dressed myself in clean, fresh linen, donned my breeches, a pair of
hand-knitted, old-country, heather hose and a pair of white canvas
shoes. I shaved and brushed my hair to what, in my college days, I had
considered its most elegant angle.

The remainder of the afternoon and evening was my own. I was just at
that agreeable stage of body-weariness where a book and a smoke seemed
angels from heaven. I had the books,--lots of them,--I had tobacco and
my pipe, I had a hammock to sling from the hooks on the front
veranda,--so, what care had I?

I chose a volume of "Macaulay's Essays" and, with a sigh,--the only
articulate sign of an unutterable content,--I stretched myself in the
hammock, blew clouds of smoke in the air and resigned myself to the
soothing influences.

I had lain thus for perhaps an hour, when a shadow intervened between
the page I was reading and the glare of the sun.

It was Miss Grant.

She had come by the back path and, in her noiseless rubber shoes, I had
not heard her.

I sprang out of the hammock, loosed the ring from the hook and threw
the canvas aside to make way for her.

She appeared a perfect picture of glorious loveliness and contagious