“Mother,” he said suddenly, “don’t you remember—­after Seattle was burned out—­and they got her going again?”

Mrs. Cheyne nodded, and looked critically down the crooked street.  Like her husband, she understood these gatherings, all the West over, and compared them one against another.  The fishermen began to mingle with the crowd about the town-hall doors—­blue-jowled Portuguese, their women bare-headed or shawled for the most part; clear-eyed Nova Scotians, and men of the Maritime Provinces; French, Italians, Swedes, and Danes, with outside crews of coasting schooners; and everywhere women in black, who saluted one another with gloomy pride, for this was their day of great days.  And there were ministers of many creeds,—­pastors of great, gilt-edged congregations, at the seaside for a rest, with shepherds of the regular work,—­from the priests of the Church on the Hill to bush-bearded ex-sailor Lutherans, hail-fellow with the men of a score of boats.  There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front.

They drifted along the line of seats made gay with the dresses of the summer boarders, and one of the town officials patrolled and perspired till he shone all over with pure civic pride.  Cheyne had met him for five minutes a few days before, and between the two there was entire understanding.

“Well, Mr. Cheyne, and what d’you think of our city? —­Yes, madam, you can sit anywhere you please.—­You have this kind of thing out West, I presume?”

“Yes, but we aren’t as old as you.”

“That’s so, of course.  You ought to have been at the exercises when we celebrated our two hundred and fiftieth birthday.  I tell you, Mr. Cheyne, the old city did herself credit.”

“So I heard.  It pays, too.  What’s the matter with the town that it don’t have a first-class hotel, though?”

“—­Right over there to the left, Pedro.  Heaps o’ room for you and your crowd.—­Why, that’s what I tell ’em all the time, Mr. Cheyne.  There’s big money in it, but I presume that don’t affect you any.  What we want is—­”

A heavy hand fell on his broadcloth shoulder, and the flushed skipper of a Portland coal-and-ice coaster spun him half round.  “What in thunder do you fellows mean by clappin’ the law on the town when all decent men are at sea this way?  Heh?  Town’s dry as a bone, an’ smells a sight worse sence I quit.  ‘Might ha’ left us one saloon for soft drinks, anyway.”

“Don’t seem to have hindered your nourishment this morning, Carsen.  I’ll go into the politics of it later.  Sit down by the door and think over your arguments till I come back.”

“What good is arguments to me?  In Miquelon champagne’s eighteen dollars a case and—­” The skipper lurched into his seat as an organ-prelude silenced him.