f resistance.

No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
gentle disposition,--a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was first
presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week it
was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which was
boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved
and indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the
outset, it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they
went out to fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little
sea-sick. Then he was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on
shore. He would not lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he
leaped out of the boat and made for shore, and had to be pursued and
rescued, exhausted and half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left
at home, it was a struggle every time to reconcile him and leave him.
Once he pursued a boat which he mistook for James's along the shore of
the bay, half down to Benson's Narrows, got involved in the creeks which
the tide was beginning to fill, and had to be brought ingloriously home
by a farmer, made fast on the top of a load of sweet, salt hay.

He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with
an unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but
regretful air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it
impossible for him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older,
he prevailed, and although he would generally retire into the shelter of
the cabin, he was nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion
on the water as on the shore. The relation between the two was always
touching. It evidently never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a
younger brother.

Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
for years its mirth and life.

I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike,
with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the
sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
w