s he commanded a
schooner instead of a square-rigger, and beyond him Mrs. Tabitha Crosby,
whose husband had died of yellow fever while aboard his ship in New
Orleans; and beyond Mrs. Crosby's was--well, the next building was the
Orthodox meeting-house, where the Reverend David Dishup preached.
Nowadays people call it the Congregationalist church. On the same side
of the road as the Macomber cottage were the homes of Captain Sylvanus
Baker and Captain Noah Baker and of Captain Orrin Eldridge.

Bayport, in that day, was not only by the sea, it was of the sea. The
sea winds blew over it, the sea air smelled salty in its highways and
byways, its male citizens--most of them--walked with a sea roll, and
upon the tables and whatnots of their closed and shuttered "front
parlors" or in their cupboards or closets were laquered cabinets, and
whales' teeth, and alabaster images, and carved chessmen and curious
shells and scented fans and heaven knows what, brought from heaven knows
where, but all brought in sailing ships over one or more of the seas of
the world. The average better class house in Bayport was an odd
combination of home and museum, the rear two-thirds the home section and
the remaining third, that nearest the road, the museum. Bayport front
parlors looked like museums, and generally smelled like them.

To a stranger from, let us say, the middle west, the village then must
have seemed a queer little community dozing upon its rolling hills and
by its white beaches, a community where the women had, most of them,
traveled far and seen many strange things and places, but who seldom
talked of them, preferring to chat concerning the minister's wife's new
bonnet; and whose men folk, appearing at long intervals from remote
parts of the world, spoke of the port side of a cow and compared the
three-sided clock tower of the new town hall with the peak of Teneriffe
on a foggy morning.

All this, odd as it may have seemed to visitors from inland, were but
matters of course to Sears Kendrick. To him there was nothing strange in
the deep sea atmosphere of his native town. It had been there ever since
he knew it, he fondly imagined--being as poor a prophet as most of
us--that it would always be. And, as he sat there in the Macomber yard,
his thoughts were busy, not with Bayport's past or future, but with his
own, and neither retrospect nor forecast was cheerful. He could see
little behind him except the mistakes he had made, and be