ad no interest in Fairharbor. I was taking the trip
solely because it would give me a night's sleep on the Sound. I promised
myself that on the morrow I would not even LOOK toward Harbor Castle;
but on the evening following on the same boat, return to New York.
Temptation did not stop to argue, but hastened after another victim.

I turned in at nine o'clock and the coolness, and the salt air, blessed
me with the first sleep I had known in weeks. And when I woke we were
made fast to the company's wharf at New Bedford, and the sun was well
up. I rose refreshed in body and spirit. No longer was I discouraged.
Even "The White Plume of Savoy" seemed a perfectly good tale of
romance and adventure. And the Farrells were a joke. Even if I were at
Fairharbor, I was there only on a lark, and at the expense of Curtis
Spencer, who had paid for the tickets. Distinctly the joke was on Curtis
Spencer. I lowered the window screen, and looked across the harbor. It
was a beautiful harbor. At ancient stone wharfs Jay ancient whalers
with drooping davits and squared yards, at anchor white-breasted yachts
flashed in the sun, a gray man-of-war's man flaunted the week's laundry,
a four-masted schooner dried her canvas, and over the smiling surface of
the harbor innumerable fishing boats darted. With delight I sniffed
the odors of salt water, sun-dried herring, of oakum and tar. The shore
opposite was a graceful promontory crowned with trees and decorous
gray-shingled cottages set in tiny gardens that reached to the very edge
of the harbor. The second officer was passing my window and I asked what
the promontory was called.

"Fairharbor," he said. He answered with such proprietary pride and
smiled upon Fairharbor with such approval that I ventured to guess it
was his home.

"That's right," he said; "I used to live at the New York end of the
run-in a flat. But never again! No place for the boy to play but in the
street. I found I could rent one of those old cottages over there for
the same money I paid for the flat. So I cut out New York. My boy lives
in a bathing suit now, and he can handle a catboat same as me. We have
a kitchen garden, and hens, and the fishermen here will give you all
the fish you can carry away--fish right out of the water. I guess I've
smashed the high cost of living problem all right. I wouldn't go back to
living in New York now--not if they gave me the PILGRIM."

As though trying to prod my memory, I frowned. It was