to defray the expenses of filling in the land where she stood, and the improvements of the vicinity.  He had transferred his household goods and his only daughter to her cabin, and had divided the space “between decks” and her hold into lodging-rooms, and lofts for the storage of goods.  It could hardly be said that the investment had been profitable.  His tenants vaguely recognized that his occupancy was a sentimental rather than a commercial speculation, and often generously lent themselves to the illusion by not paying their rent.  Others treated their own tenancy as a joke,—­a quaint recreation born of the childlike familiarity of frontier intercourse.  A few had left; carelessly abandoning their unsalable goods to their landlord, with great cheerfulness and a sense of favor.  Occasionally Mr. Abner Nott, in a practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily placated by a compliment to the “dear old ship,” or an effort made by some tenant to idealize his apartment.  A photographer who had ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of the pretty face of Rosey Nott.  The superstitious reverence in which Abner Nott held his monstrous fancy was naturally enhanced by his purely bucolic exaggeration of its real functions and its native element.  “This yer keel has sailed, and sailed, and sailed,” he would explain with some incongruity of illustration, “in a bee line, makin’ tracks for days runnin’.  I reckon more storms and blizzards hez tackled her than you ken shake a stick at.  She’s stampeded whales afore now, and sloshed round with pirates and freebooters in and outer the Spanish Main, and across lots from Marcelleys where she was rared.  And yer she sits peaceful-like just ez if she’d never been outer a pertater patch, and hadn’t ploughed the sea with fo’sails and studdin’ sails and them things cavortin’ round her masts.”

Abner Nott’s enthusiasm was shared by his daughter, but with more imagination, and an intelligence stimulated by the scant literature of her father’s emigrant wagon and the few books found on the cabin shelves.  But to her the strange shell she inhabited suggested more of the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father’s lodgers.  Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it.  She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself of its secrets.  She had in fancy made voyages in it to foreign lands, had heard the accents of a softer tongue on its decks, and on summer nights, from the roof of the quarter-deck, had seen mellower constellations take the place of the hard metallic