Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And the bosun tight and the midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.

recited the red-haired person.

“You!” said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.

“Even I,” said the red-haired person.  “I’m the superintendent, the staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the ambulance driver.”

Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of asking him what he meant.  Anyhow, probably she had already guessed.  Jane was no fool.

“I hope you’re getting the salary list,” she said, sitting on the pantry girl’s chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to quarrel with, feeling more like herself.  “My father’s one of the directors, and somebody gets it.”

The red-haired person sat on the radiator and eyed Jane.  He looked slightly stunned, as if the presence of beauty in a Billie Burke chignon and little else except a kimono was almost too much for him.  From somewhere near by came a terrific thumping, as of some one pounding a hairbrush on a table.  The red-haired person shifted along the radiator a little nearer Jane, and continued to gloat.

“Don’t let that noise bother you,” he said; “that’s only the convalescent typhoid banging for his breakfast.  He’s been shouting for food ever since I came at six last night.”

“Is it safe to feed him so much?”

“I don’t know.  He hasn’t had anything yet.  Perhaps if you’re ready you’d better fix him something.”

Jane had finished her bread and tea by this time and remembered her kimono.

“I’ll go back and dress,” she said primly.  But he wouldn’t hear of it.

“He’s starving,” he objected as a fresh volley of thumps came along the hall.  “I’ve been trying at intervals since daylight to make him a piece of toast.  The minute I put it on the fire I think of something I’ve forgotten, and when I come back it’s in flames.”

So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired person told his story.

“You see,” he explained, “although I appear to be a furnace man from the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new superintendent.”

“I hope you’ll do better than the last one,” she said severely.  “He was always flirting with the nurses.”

“I shall never flirt with the nurses,” he promised, looking at her.  “Anyhow I shan’t have any immediate chance.  The other fellow left last night and took with him everything portable except the ambulance—­nurses, staff, cooks.  I wish to Heaven he’d taken the patients!  And he did more than that.  He cut the telephone wires!”

“Well!” said Jane.  “Are you going to stand for it?”

The red-haired man threw up his hands.  “The village is with him,” he declared.  “It’s a factional fight—­the village against the fashionable summer colony on the hill.  I cannot telephone from the village—­the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning—­look here.”  He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read: