And they made a hit with the boarders, especially the women folks.  Take the crankiest old battle ship that ever cruised into breakfast with diamond headlights showing and a pretty daughter in tow, and she would eat lumpy oatmeal and scorched eggs and never sound a distress signal.  How could she, with one of them nice-looking gentlemanly waiters hanging over her starboard beam and purring, “Certainly, madam,” and “Two lumps or one, madam?” into her ear?  Then, too, she hadn’t much time to find fault with the grub, having to keep one eye on the daughter.  The amount of complaints that them college boys saved in the first fortnight was worth their season’s wages, pretty nigh.  Before June was over the Old Home was full up and we had to annex a couple of next-door houses for the left-overs.

I was skipper for one of them houses, and Jonadab run the other.  Each of us had a cook and a waiter, a housekeeper and an up-stairs girl.  My housekeeper was the boss prize in the package.  Her name was Mabel Seabury, and she was young and quiet and as pretty as the first bunch of Mayflowers in the spring.  And a lady—­whew!  The first time I set opposite to her at table I made up my mind I wouldn’t drink out of my sasser if I scalded the lining off my throat.

She was city born and brought up, but she wa’n’t one of your common “He! he! ain’t you turrible!” lunch-counter princesses, with a head like a dandelion gone to seed and a fish-net waist.  You bet she wa’n’t!  Her dad had had money once, afore he tried to beat out Jonah and swallow the stock exchange whale.  After that he was skipper of a little society library up to Cambridge, and she kept house for him.  Then he died and left her his blessing, and some of Peter Brown’s wife’s folks, that knew her when she was well off, got her the job of housekeeper here with us.

The only trouble she made was first along, and that wa’n’t her fault.  I thought at one time we’d have to put up a wire fence to keep them college waiters away from her.  They hung around her like a passel of gulls around a herring boat.  She was nice to ’em, too, but when you’re just so nice to everybody and not nice enough to any special one, the prospect ain’t encouraging.  So they give it up, but there wa’n’t a male on the place, from old Dr. Blatt, mixer of Blatt’s Burdock Bitters and Blatt’s Balm for Beauty, down to the boy that emptied the ashes, who wouldn’t have humped himself on all fours and crawled eight miles if she’d asked him to.  And that includes me and Cap’n Jonadab, and we’re about as tough a couple of women-proof old hulks as you’ll find afloat.

Jonadab took a special interest in her.  It pretty nigh broke his heart to think she was running my house instead of his.  He thought she’d ought to be married and have a home of her own.

“Well,” says I, “why don’t she get married then?  She could drag out and tie up any single critter of the right sex in this neighborhood with both hands behind her back.”