re ain't 'nough land at the south pole to make Marm
Scudder's garden--and they say she didn't need more'n what her
patchwork quilt would cover. Where there's land there's folks. And if
there was land in the Antarctic there'd be Eskimos like there is up
North.

"'Hem! Well, that wasn't what I begun on, was it? This knitting.
Cap'n Am'zon says that many's the time he's thanked his stars he knowed
how to knit."

"I shall be glad to meet him," said Louise.

"If he comes," Cap'n Abe rejoined, "an' I go away as I planned to,
'twon't make a mite o' difference to you, Niece Louise. You feel right
at home here--and so'll Cap'n Am'zon, though he ain't never been to
Cardhaven yet. He'll be a lot better company for you than I'd be."

"Oh, Cap'n Abe, I can scarcely believe that!" cried the girl.

"You don't know Cap'n Am'zon," the storekeeper said. "I tell ye fair:
he's ev'rything that I ain't! As a boy--'hem!--Am'zon was always
leadin' an' me follerin'. I kinder took after my mother, I guess.
She was your grandmother. Your grandfather was a Card--and a nice man
he was.

"Our father--me an' Am'zon's--was Cap'n Joshua Silt of the schooner
_Bravo_. Hi-mighty trim and taut craft she was, from all accounts.
I--I warn't born when he died," added Cap'n Abe, hesitatingly.

"You were a posthumous child!" said Louise.

"Er--I guess so. Kinder 'pindlin', too. Yes! yes! Cap'n Am'zon's
ahead o' me--in ev'ry way. When father died 'twas pretty average hard
on mother," Cap'n Abe pursued. "We was llvin' at Rocky Head, I guess I
told you b'fore?"

"Yes," Louise said, interested.

"The _Bravo_ was makin' reg'lar trips from Newport to Bangor, Maine.
Short-coastin' v'y'ges paid well in them days. There come a big storm
in the spring--onexpected. Mother'd got a letter from Cap'n
Josh--father he'd put out o' Newport with a sartain tide. He warn't
jest a fair-weather skipper. Cap'n Am'zon gits his pluck an' darin'
from Cap'n Josh.

"Well, mother knowed he must be out o' sight of Fort Adams and the
Dumplin's when the storm burst, and that he'd take the inside passage,
the wind bein' what it was. She watched from Rocky Head and she seen
what she knowed to be the _Bravo_ heave in sight.

"There warn't no foolin' her," pursued Cap'n Abe, whose pipe had gone
out but whose knitting needles twinkled the faster. "No. She knowed
the schooner far's she could glim her. She watched the Bravo caught in
the cross-current when t