Whew!"

He grinned from ear to ear. The captain accepted the compromise.

"All right, Judah," he said. "We'll call the first few days a visit and
I'll begin by stayin' to dinner now. How'll that do, eh?"

Mr. Cahoon affirmed that it would do finely. The only drawback was that
there was nothing in the house for dinner.

"I was cal'latin' to go down to the shore," he said, "and dig a bucket
of clams. Course they'll do well enough for me, but for you--"

"For me they will be just the ticket," declared Kendrick. "Go ahead and
dig 'em, Judah. And on the way stop and tell Sarah I'm goin' to stay
here and help eat 'em. After dinner--well, after dinner I shall have to
go back there again, I suppose, but to-morrow I'm comin' up here to
stay."

So, still under protest, Judah, having unloaded the seaweed, climbed
once more to the high seat of the truck-wagon and the old horse dragged
him out of the yard. After the row of trees bordering the road had
hidden him from sight Kendrick could hear the rattle of the cart and a
fragment of the _Dreadnought_ chantey.

"Now the _Dreadnought's_ becalmed on the banks of Newfoundland,
Where the water's all green and the bottom's all sand.
Says the fish of the ocean that swim to and fro:
'She's the Liverpool packet, good Lord, let her go.'"

Rattle and chantey died away in the distance. Quiet, warm and lazy,
settled down upon the back yard of the General Minot place. A robin
piped occasionally and, from somewhere off to the left, hens clucked,
but these were the only sounds. Kendrick judged that the hens must
belong to neighbors; Judah had expressed detestation of all poultry.
There was not sufficient breeze to stir the branches of the locust or
the leaves of the grapevine. The captain leaned back on the settee and
yawned. He felt a strong desire to go to sleep.

Now sleeping in the daytime had always been a trick which he despised
and against which he had railed all his life. He had declared times
without number that a man who slept in the daytime--unless of course he
had been on watch all night or something like that--was a loafer, a good
for nothing, a lubber too lazy to be allowed on earth. The day was a
period made for decent, respectable people to work in, and for a man who
did not work, and love to work, Captain Sears Kendrick had no use
whatever. Many so-called able seamen, and even first and second mates,
had received painstaking instructions in this section of