nd sorrowful, like a lost child.--As for ghosts," he
continued, after a thoughtful pause, "I don't know any that would have
reason for walking, without it was Captain Kidd. His treasure's buried
along-shore here."

"Ay?" said Mary, looking up shrewdly into his face.

"Yes," he answered, shaking his head slowly, and measuring his whip with
one eye. "Along here, many's the Spanish half-dollar I've picked up
myself among the kelp. They do say they're from a galleon that went
ashore come next August thirty years ago, but I don't know that."

"And the people in the hamlet?" questioned Mary, nodding to a group of
scattered, low-roofed houses.

"Clam-fishers, the maist o' them. There be quite a many wrackers, but
they live farther on, towards Barnegat. But a wrack draws them, like
buzzards to a carcass."

Miss Defourchet's black eye kindled, as if at the prospect of a good
tragedy.

"Did you ever see a wreck going down?" she asked, eagerly.

"Yes,"--shutting his grim lips tighter.

"That emigrant ship last fall? Seven hundred and thirty souls lost, they
told me."

"I was not here to know, thank God," shortly.

"It would be a sensation for a lifetime,"--cuddling back into her seat,
with no hopes of a story from the old Doctor.

MacAulay sat up stiffer, his stern gray eye scanning the ocean-line
again, as the mare turned into the more open plains of sand sloping down
to the sea. It was up-hill work with him, talking to this young lady. He
was afraid of a woman who had lectured in public, nursed in the
hospitals, whose blood seemed always at fever heat, and whose aesthetic
taste could seek the point of view from which to observe a calamity so
horrible as the emigrant ship going down with her load of lives. "She's
been fed on books too much," he thought. "It's the trouble with young
women nowadays." On the other hand, for himself, he had lost sight of
the current of present knowledges,--he was aware of that, finding how
few topics in common there were between them; but it troubled the
self-reliant old fellow but little. Since he left Yale, where he and
this girl's uncle, Doctor Bowdler, had been chums together, he had lived
in this out-of-the-way corner of the world, and many of the rough ways
of speaking and acting of the people had clung to him, as their red mud
to his shoes. As he grew older, he did not care to brush either off.

Miss Defourchet had been a weight on his mind for a week or more. Her
guardian, Doct