The store was sold, the furniture packed, and Reuben Miller, with his wife and child, set his face eastward to begin life anew.  The change from the rich wheat fields and glorious forests of Western New York, to the bare stony stretches of the Atlantic sea-board, is a severe one.  No adult heart can make it without a struggle.  When Reuben looked out of the car windows upon the low gray barrens through which he was nearing his journey end, his soul sank within him.  It was sunset; the sea glistened like glass, and was as red as the sky.  Draxy could not speak for delight; tears stood in her eyes, and she took hold of her father’s hand.  But Reuben and Jane saw only the desolate rocks, and treeless, shrubless, almost—­it seemed to them—­grassless fields, and an unutterable sense of gloom came over them.  It was a hot and stifling day; a long drought had parched and shriveled every living thing; and the white August dust lay everywhere.

Captain Melville lived in the older part of the town near the water.  The houses were all wooden, weather-beaten, and gray, and had great patches of yellow lichen on their walls and roofs; thin rims of starved-looking grass edged the streets, and stray blades stood up here and there among the old sunken cobble-stones which made the pavements.

The streets seemed deserted; the silence and the sombre color, and the strange low plashing of the water against the wharves, oppressed even Draxy’s enthusiastic heart.  Her face fell, and she exclaimed involuntarily, “Oh, what a lonesome place!” Checking herself, she added, “but it’s only the twilight makes it look so, I expect.”

They had some difficulty in finding the house.  The lanes and streets seemed inextricably tangled; the little party was shy of asking direction, and they were all disappointed and grieved, more than they owned to themselves, that they had not been met at the station.  At last they found the house.  Timidly Draxy lifted the great brass knocker.  It looked to her like splendor, and made her afraid.  It fell more heavily than she supposed it would, and the clang sounded to her over-wrought nerves as if it filled the whole street.  No one came.  They looked at the windows.  The curtains were all down.  There was no sign of life about the place.  Tears came into Jane’s eyes.  She was worn out with the fatigue of the journey.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” she said, “I wish we hadn’t come.”

“Pshaw, mother,” said Reuben, with a voice cheerier than his heart, “very likely they never got our last letter, and don’t know we were to be here to-day,” and he knocked again.

Instantly a window opened in the opposite house, and a jolly voice said, “My gracious,” and in the twinkling of an eye the jolly owner of the jolly voice had opened her front door and run bareheaded across the street, and was shaking hands with Reuben and Jane and Draxy, all three at once, and talking so fast that they could hardly understand her.