the wainscot."

"Rats don't step like a grown man in his stocking-feet, nor make the
rafters creak, either."

Madam Bushnell appeared to be investigating the contents of the pot
hanging on the crane, and perhaps the heat of the blazing wood was
sufficient to account for the burning of her cheeks. She cooled them
a moment later by going down cellar after cider, a mug of which she
offered to her husband, proposing the while that he should have his
chair out of doors, and sit under the sycamore tree by the river-bank.
When he assented, and she had seen him safely in the chair, she made
haste to David's bed-room.

Since Mr. Bushnell's illness began, no one had ascended to the chamber
except herself and her son.

On two shelves hanging against the wall were the books that he had
brought home with him from Yale College, just four weeks ago.

A table was drawn near to the one window in the room. On it were bits
of wood, with iron scraps, fragments of glass and copper. In fact, the
same thing to-day would suggest boat-building to the mother of any lad
finding them among her boy's playthings. To this mother they suggested
nothing beyond the fact that David was engaged in something which he
wished to keep a profound secret.

He had not told her so. It had not been necessary. She had divined it
and kept silence, having all a mother's confidence in, and hope of,
her son's success in life.

As she surveyed the place, she thought:

"There is nothing here, even if he (meaning her husband) should take
it into his head to come up and look about."

Meanwhile young David had crossed the Pochaug River, and was half the
way to Pautapoug.

All this happened more than a thousand moons ago, when all the land
was aroused and astir, and David Bushnell was not in the least
surprised to meet, at the ship-yard of Uriah Hayden, Jonathan
Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut.

This man was everywhere, seeing to everything, in that year. Whatever
his country needed, or Commander-in-chief Washington ordered from the
camp at Cambridge, was forthcoming.

A ship had been demanded of Connecticut, and so Governor Trumbull had
come down from Lebanon to look with his own eyes at the huge ribs of
oak, thereafter to sail the seas as "The Oliver Cromwell."

The self-same oaken ribs had intense interest for young David
Bushnell. Uriah Hayden had promised to sell to him all the pieces of
ship-timber that should be left, and while the governor and the