“’Or old Valhalla’s roaring hail,
Her ever-circling mead and ale,’”

the doctor sang, and Phebe joined his song,—­

“’Where for eternity unite
The joys of wassail ad the fight,’”

for the stirring ballad was a favorite with them both.

Mac levelled his fork at them accusingly.

“You mustn’t sing at ve table.  It’s horrid to sing at ve table.”

“I beg your pardon, Mac,” said his grandfather meekly.

Outside their windows, the sun was glowing over the steel blue sea.  Not a sail broke the distance; only the ceaseless tossing of white foam above the rips, and close at hand a dory or two, rocking and rolling just outside the line of surf.  In the foreground was a broad strip of sand and silvery beach grass then a narrower strip of sand without any grass at all, and then the huge breakers which came crashing in, wave on wave, mounting up, curling over, falling, breaking and racing up the sharp slope of sand, with never a halt for rest.  Beyond that, the sea; beyond that again, three thousand miles beyond, Spain.

Qantuck lies crescent-wise along its low sandy cliff.  The arms of the crescent are made up of new houses of more normal shape and size; but between them, the primeval village huddles itself together around the old town pump.  No seaside villas are there, but the tiny low cottages of the old fishing hamlet, which seem to have grown like an amoeba, by the simple process of putting out arms in any direction that chance may dictate.  Between them, the rutted, grass-grown roads are so narrow that traffic is seriously congested by the meeting of a box cart and a certain stout old dachshund that frequents the streets, and the cottages present their fronts or sides or rears to the roads, according to the whim of the owner.  Crowded under the cliff are the bits of fishhouses, built, like the cottages above, all of shingles all gray with the passing years, for Quantuck history stretches back far into the long-ago, when, Town seven miles away, was a prosperous whaling port.  But though the summer visitors come in schools like the bluefish, the little gray village on the cliff is unchanging and unchanged.

In the very heart of the old settlement, poised on the verge of the cliff, Valhalla and Dandelion Lodge were side by side, and the middle of July found Dr. McAlister in one, in the other the Farringtons with Hubert and Allyn as their guests.

“Valhalla can’t hold you all,” Billy had said, when they were making their plans for the summer.  “If we take the Lodge, there will be an extra room, and Allyn and Hubert may as well use it.  It really won’t make any difference how we divide up.  At Quantuck the houses only count on foggy days.”