Peter said Beriah and Eben was just the sort of “cards” he was looking for and drove right over to see ’em.  He hooked ’em, too.  I knew he would; he could talk a Come-Outer into believing that a Unitarian wasn’t booked for Tophet, if he set out to.

So the special train from Boston brought the “house-party” down, and our two-seated buggy brought Beriah and Eben over.  They didn’t have anything to do but to look “picturesque” and say “I snum!” and “I swan to man!” and they could do that to the skipper’s taste.  The city folks thought they was “just too dear and odd for anything,” and made ’em bigger fools than ever, which wa’n’t necessary.

The second day of the “party” was to be a sailing trip clear down to the life-saving station on Setuckit Beach.  It certainly looked as if ’twas going to storm, and the Gov’ment predictions said it was, but Beriah said “No,” and stuck out that ’twould clear up by and by.  Peter wanted to know what I thought about their starting, and I told him that ’twas my experience that where weather was concerned Beriah was a good, safe anchorage.  So they sailed away, and, sure enough, it cleared up fine.  And the next day the Gov’ment fellers said “clear” and Beriah said “rain,” and she poured a flood.  And, after three or four of such experiences, Beriah was all hunky with the “house-party,” and they looked at him as a sort of wonderful freak, like a two-headed calf or the “snake child,” or some such outrage.

So, when the party was over, ’round comes Peter, busting with a new notion.  What he cal’lated to do was to start a weather prophesying bureau all on his own hook, with Beriah for prophet, and him for manager and general advertiser, and Jonadab and me to help put up the money to get her going.  He argued that summer folks from Scituate to Provincetown, on both sides of the Cape, would pay good prices for the real thing in weather predictions.  The Gov’ment bureau, so he said, covered too much ground, but Beriah was local and hit her right on the head.  His idee was to send Beriah’s predictions by telegraph to agents in every Cape town each morning, and the agents was to hand ’em to susscribers.  First week a free trial; after that, so much per prophecy.

And it worked—­oh, land, yes! it worked.  Peter’s letters and circulars would satisfy anybody that black was white, and the free trial was a sure bait.  I don’t know why ’tis, but if you offered the smallpox free, there’d be a barrel of victims waiting in line to come down with it.  Brown rigged up a little shanty on the bluff in front of the “Old Home,” and filled it full of barometers and thermometers and chronometers and charts, and put Beriah and Eben inside to look wise and make b’lieve do something.  That was the office of “The South Shore Weather Bureau,” and ’twas sort of sacred and holy, and ’twould kill you to see the boarders tip-toeing up and peeking in the winder to watch them two old coots squinting through a telescope at the sky or scribbling rubbish on paper.  And Beriah was right ’most every time.  I don’t know why—­ my notion is that he was born that way, same as some folks are born lightning calculators—­but I’ll never forget the first time Peter asked him how he done it.