n before with Bruno. Mr.
Neckart and I will follow."

Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had
thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front
of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed
with the dog. She probably would not be in his way.

CHAPTER IV.

Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger
spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were
the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color
in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the
brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town,
there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog
incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched
for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats
and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into
some yet farther region.

"Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her
dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away
together.

Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some
fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of
mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little
skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their
nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails
and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When
the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over,
with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the
fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook
hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an
up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he
was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.

Mr. Neckart, who was formally introduced, nodded curtly, but did not sit
down.

"A good day for the perch, Sutphen," said the captain, handing round a
bundle of cigars.

"Yaas."

"But you ought to have been on the banks by daylight." Mr. Neckart's
sharp, irritable voice jarred somehow on the quiet sunshine.

"Yaas. But I lent my boat last week, and this here one's out of
repair.--Give me more of them nails, David."