ate his foreign
adventures, he always responded with, "What would you like to hear?" it
was thought that he fabricated his article to suit his market. In short,
there was no species of experience, finny, fishy, or aquatic,--no legend
of strange and unaccountable incident of fire or flood,--no romance of
foreign scenery and productions, to which his tongue was not competent,
when he had once seated himself in a double bow-knot at a neighbor's
evening fireside.

His good wife, a sharp-eyed, literal body, and a vigorous church-member,
felt some concern of conscience on the score of these narrations; for,
being their constant auditor, she, better than any one else, could
perceive the variations and discrepancies of text which showed their
mythical character, and oftentimes her black eyes would snap and her
knitting-needles rattle with an admonitory vigor as he went on, and
sometimes she would unmercifully come in at the end of a narrative
with,--

"Well, now, the Cap'n's told them ar stories till he begins to b'lieve
'em himself, I think."

But works of fiction, as we all know, if only well gotten up, have
always their advantages in the hearts of listeners over plain, homely
truth; and so Captain Kittridge's yarns were marketable fireside
commodities still, despite the skepticisms which attended them.

The afternoon sunbeams at this moment are painting the gambrel-roof with
a golden brown. It is September again, as it was three years ago when
our story commenced, and the sea and sky are purple and amethystine with
its Italian haziness of atmosphere.

The brown house stands on a little knoll, about a hundred yards from the
open ocean. Behind it rises a ledge of rocks, where cedars and hemlocks
make deep shadows into which the sun shoots golden shafts of light,
illuminating the scarlet feathers of the sumach, which throw themselves
jauntily forth from the crevices; while down below, in deep, damp, mossy
recesses, rise ferns which autumn has just begun to tinge with yellow
and brown. The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its right
hand a tiny bay, where the ocean water made up amid picturesque
rocks--shaggy and solemn. Here trees of the primeval forest, grand and
lordly, looked down silently into the waters which ebbed and flowed
daily into this little pool. Every variety of those beautiful evergreens
which feather the coast of Maine, and dip their wings in the very spray
of its ocean foam, found here a represe