tongue in the village--tongues of animals and small children
excepted--wagged his name. At the sewing-circle, at the Shakespeare
Reading Society--convening that week at Mrs. Tabitha Crosby's--after
Friday night prayer-meeting at the Orthodox meeting-house, in Eliphalet
Bassett's store at mail times, in the sitting-rooms and kitchens and
around breakfast, dinner and supper tables from West Bayport to East
Bayport Neck and from Poverty Lane to Woodchuck's Misery--the principal
topic was Captain Kendrick's surprising move.

"Why?" that was the question.

Various answers were offered, many reasons suggested, but none satisfied
everybody.

At the Shakespeare Society meeting, just before the reading aloud of
"Cymbeline" began--"Cymbeline" carefully edited, censored and kalsomined
by the selective committee, Mrs. Reverend David Dishup and Miss Tryphosa
Taylor--the feelings of the genteel section of the community were
expressed by no less a personage than Mrs. Captain Elkanah Wingate. Mrs.
Wingate, speaking from the Mount Sinai of Bayport's aristocracy, made
proclamation thus:

"Why, if the man must leave his sister's and go somewhere else to live,
_why_ in the world does he choose to go _there_? Aren't there good,
respectable, genteel boarding-houses like--well, like yours, Naomi, for
instance? _I_ should say so."

Mrs. Naomi Newcomb, whose home sheltered a few "paying guests," smiled
and shook her head. The shake indicated not a doubt of Mrs. Wingate's
judgment, but complete loss as to Sears Kendrick's reasons for behaving
as he had. Other members shook their heads also. Mary-Pashy Foster, who
had spent a winter in France when her husband was ill with the small-pox
at Havre, shrugged her shoulders.

"And," continued Mrs. Captain Wingate, "when you consider the place he
has gone to and the person he has gone with! Good heavens, _I_ say! Good
heavens!"

More words and exclamations of approval. Several others declared that
they said so, too.

"Gone to live," went on Mrs. Wingate, "not in the General Minot house
proper--there might be some explanation for _that_, perhaps--but they
tell me that this Judah Cahoon only uses the back part of the house and
that Cap'n Kendrick has got a room just off the kitchen or thereabouts."

"And Judah himself!" broke in Miss Taylor. "He is as rough and common
as--as--I don't know what. How a man like Cap'n Kendrick can lower
himself--debase himself to such a person's level I _do_ not