“What’s the matter, Galusha?” he whispered.  “Brace up, old man! you look as if you were seeing spooks already.  Not sick—­faint, or anything like that?”

Galusha blushed.  “Eh?” he queried.  “Oh—­oh, no, no.  Quite so, really.  Eh?  Ah—­yes.”

Cabot chuckled.  “That’s a comprehensive answer, at any rate,” he observed.  “Come now, be my Who’s-Who.  For example, what is the name of the female under the hat like a—­a steamer basket?”

Galusha looked.  “That is Miss Hoag, the—­ah—­medium,” he said.

“Oh, I see.  Did the spirits build that hat for her?”

Miss Hoag’s headgear was intrinsically the same she had worn at the former seance, although the arrangement of the fruit, flowers, sprays and other accessories was a trifle different.  The red cherries, for example, no longer bobbed at the peak of the roof; they now hung jauntily from the rear eaves, so to speak.  The purple grapes had also moved and peeped coyly from a thicket of moth-eaten rosebuds.  The wearer of this revamped millinery triumph seemed a bit nervous, even anxious, so it seemed to Martha Phipps, who, like Cabot and Galusha, was looking at her.  Marietta kept hitching in her seat, pulling at her gown, and glancing from time to time at the gloomy countenance of Captain Jethro, who, Miss Phipps also noticed, was regarding her steadily and slowly pulling at his beard.  This regard seemed to add to Miss Hoag’s uneasiness.

The majority of those present were staring at the senior partner of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot.  The object of the attention could not help becoming aware of it.

“What are they all looking at me for?” he demanded, under his breath.

Galusha did not hear the question, but Primmie did, and answered it.

“They don’t know who you be,” she whispered.

“What of it?  I don’t know who they are, either.”

Miss Cash sniffed.  “Humph!” she declared, “you wouldn’t know much worth knowin’ if you did—­the heft of ’em. . . .  Oh, my savin’ soul, it’s a-goin’ to begin!  Where’s my mouth organ?”

But, to her huge disappointment, her services as mouth organist were not to be requisitioned this time.  Captain Hallett, taking charge of the gathering, made an announcement.

“The melodeon’s been fixed,” he said, “and Miss Black’s kind enough to say she’ll play it for us.  Take your places, all hands.  Come on, now, look alive!  Tut, tut, tut!  Abe Hardin’, for heaven’s sakes, can’t you pick up your moorin’s, or what does ail you?  Come to anchor!  Set down!”

Mr. Harding was, apparently, having trouble in sitting down.  He made several nervous and hurried attempts, but none was successful.  His wife begged, in one of her stage whispers, to be informed if he’d been “struck deef.”  “Don’t you hear the cap’n talkin’ to you?” she demanded.

“Course I hear him,” retorted her husband, testily, and in the same comprehensively audible whisper.  “No, I ain’t been struck deef—­ nor dumb neither.”