Lantern in hand he clambered clumsily from beneath the boot and disappeared.  Inside the vehicle was blackness, dense, damp and profound.

“Auntie,” said a second feminine voice, “Auntie, what do you suppose has happened?”

“I don’t know, Emily.  I’m prepared for ’most anything by this time.  Maybe we’ve landed on Mount Ararat.  I feel as if I’d been afloat for forty days and nights.  Land sakes alive!” as another gust shot and beat its accompanying cloudburst through and between the carriage curtains; “right in my face and eyes!  I don’t wonder that boy wished he was a duck.  I’d like to be a fish—­or a mermaid.  I couldn’t be much wetter if I was either one, and I’d have gills so I could breathe under water.  I suppose mermaids have gills, I don’t know.”

Emily laughed.  “Aunt Thankful,” she declared, “I believe you would find something funny in a case of smallpox.”

“Maybe I should; I never tried.  ’Twouldn’t be much harder than to be funny with—­with rain-water on the brain.  I’m so disgusted with myself I don’t know what to do.  The idea of me, daughter and granddaughter of seafarin’ folks that studied the weather all their lives, not knowin’ enough to stay to home when it looked as much like a storm as it did this mornin’.  And draggin’ you into it, too.  We could have come tomorrow or next day just as well, but no, nothin’ to do but I must start today ‘cause I’d planned to.  This comes of figgerin’ to profit by what folks leave to you in wills.  Talk about dead men’s shoes!  Live men’s rubber boots would be worth more to you and me this minute.  Such a cruise as this has been!”

It had been a hard trip, certainly, and the amount of water through which they had traveled the latter part of it almost justified its being called a “cruise.”  Old Captain Abner Barnes, skipper, for the twenty years before his death, of the coasting schooner T. I. Smalley, had, during his life-long seafaring, never made a much rougher voyage, all things considered, than that upon which his last will and testament had sent his niece and her young companion.

Captain Abner, a widower, had, when he died, left his house and land at East Wellmouth to his niece by marriage, Mrs. Thankful Barnes.  Thankful, whose husband, Eben Barnes, was lost at sea the year after their marriage, had been living with and acting as housekeeper for an elderly woman named Pearson at South Middleboro.  She, Thankful, had never visited her East Wellmouth inheritance.  For four years after she inherited it she received the small rent paid her by the tenant, one Laban Eldredge.  His name was all she knew concerning him.  Then he died and for the next eight months the house stood empty.  And then came one more death, that of old Mrs. Pearson, the lady for whom Thankful had “kept house.”

Left alone and without present employment, the Widow Barnes considered what she should do next.  And, thus considering, the desire to visit and inspect her East Wellmouth property grew and strengthened.  She thought more and more concerning it.  It was hers, she could do what she pleased with it, and she began to formulate vague ideas as to what she might like to do.  She kept these ideas to herself, but she spoke to Emily Howes concerning the possibilities of a journey to East Wellmouth.