women—and I gave a little start, for it had occurred to me that the chauffeur was a Frenchman. And I wondered if they—but of course they did. Such things do not happen by accident—with Old Goodwin and Eve.

It was cold for the season. It had been cold and wet for three weeks, and my corn was not up, nor my melons that I had put in three weeks before, nor my beans. My experiment with melons has not yet been a failure if it has not been a success this year. I was doubtful about the corn, so I dug up a kernel, and I found it sprouted, and I put it back and covered it. My peas were up, and doing bravely, and the beans were about breaking through, for the earth was cracked all along the rows. And I got out my sections of stout wire fencing, and put them in place along the rows of peas. They take the place of pea-brush, and are much easier to put up and to take down. The fencing is fastened to stout posts, and the posts have pieces of iron, about a foot and a half long, shaped much like a marlin-spike, bolted to them for driving into the ground. I can take my sledgehammer and drive the posts, and get a row of peas wired in a tenth the time needed to set brush, and the fencing is much less expensive, in the long run. My fences have done service for thirteen years already, and they are perfectly good.

So I fussed around among the peas, and planted more corn and more beans, and more melons, and a row of chard, and two rows of okra, and some other things. I often think that the place for tall green okra is the flower garden. The blossoms are beautiful, delicate things, more beautiful than most of the hollyhocks. And now and then I stopped my planting—a man has to rest his back—and I leaned on my hoe or my rake or whatever I happened to have in my hand, and I thought my thoughts. They were many, and they were not, at such moments, of my planting.

The harbor was almost empty still. There was but one fisherman's boat and two motor boats, little fellows, not suited to patrolling. And the sky was gray, and getting darker, and the winter gulls flying across, and wheeling and screaming harshly. Occasionally a gull beat across my garden, flying low and screaming his harsh note. I watched them, and envied them until I saw a fish-hawk sailing high up among the clouds. Then I envied him: his calmness and serenity, and his powers of wing and eye, seeing the swimming fish from that height, and perfectly secure. Then, naturally enough, I thought of aeroplanes, sailing and circling like the great hawk, and seeing their prey as surely as he. I never had the slightest wish to go up in an aeroplane. The hawk seems secure in his sailing, the aeroplane does not, and I may envy the hawk while shrinking unaccountably from the aeroplane. But if they can see the submarine from up there, and can pounce upon it as surely as the hawk strikes his fish—well, if we had a plague of submarines, it would be a comfort to see a hawk now and then. And I thought of Jimmy Wales and Bobby Leverett and Ogilvie searching the waters for that which was not.

Jimmy has put in here every few days. It is hard to see why, but we have seen a good deal of Ogilvie and Bobby, and Bobby has seen more or less of Elizabeth Radnor. She is still rather a mystery to me, a girl that Mrs. Goodwin chanced upon somewhere, and took a great fancy to. That is not strange, that Miss Radnor should have been fancied, but it is strange that Mrs. Goodwin should have taken the fancy, and that she should have asked her here for an indefinite stay. Mrs. Goodwin did not use to fancy obscure teachers of athletics or gymnastics or dancing in girls' schools, and Miss Radnor is or was something of the kind. She may be giving lessons in dancing to Mrs. Goodwin for all I know—or to Bobby. It is not of much consequence. If Bobby should really come upon submarines, it would be of little consequence to him.

Thinking upon submarines, there came into my head the account that I had just seen in the London "Times" of the capture of a submarine by a trawler. As I recollect it, the trawler was going about her business in the North Sea—a business not unconnected with submarines—when suddenly a submarine began to emerge from the deep just ahead. The trawler put on all the speed she had time for, and rammed the submarine amidships, sliding up on its body half her length, so that the captain found himself well-nigh stranded near the periscope. Whereupon he called for an axe, and smashed that periscope into scrap iron and fragments of glass. The trawler then slid off, and the submarine opened, and the crew poured forth upon her deck and forthwith surrendered, and the trawler towed them into an English port. Thinking upon this, I laughed aloud to the gulls and the hawk. I had refrained from going to Boston to have my imagination stirred by looking at a parade and listening to the bands!

To stir my imagination! I had but to picture to myself the destroyer fight in the Channel on the night of April 20, two English destroyers, Swift and Broke, against six German destroyers, in the darkness of a black night; a five-minute battle, but those five minutes crowded full. Ramming, torpedoing, repelling boarders, fighting with pistols and cutlases and bayonets, responding to a treacherous call to save—it was all worthy of the times of Drake. Stir my imagination! I found myself starting forward and brandishing the hoe, my breath coming fast, and my eyes, I have no doubt, flashing fire. I laughed again. It was raining. It had been raining, I suppose, for five minutes at least, and I had not known it. I gathered up my tools, put them in the shed, and went into the house to change my clothes, and to consume my pint of milk, while my daughter, opposite me, consumed hers—and some other things besides.

After luncheon I put on my rubber boots and went out. It was still raining, a good hard drizzle from the southeast. It suited me well enough, and I wandered the shores all the afternoon, or stood in the shelter of a tree and looked out over the bay. I liked it. There is something soothing and at the same time stirring in such a day and such a place. There was a good heavy breeze, and the seas marched, and the sound of their breaking, and the fresh wet wind on my cheek, and the gray veil of rain over the rolling water, with not a sail or so much as a smudge of smoke in sight—well, it is hardly worth while to say how it affects me. Those who feel as I do will not need to be told, and for those who do not it would be useless. But man seems a little thing, and the affairs of man of no importance—absolutely none.

As the afternoon wore on, the drizzle became less and finally stopped, although it was still gray. And then the clouds began to break, and I wandered homeward along the shore, and I climbed the steep path, and sat me on the seat under my great pine, where I could see the water and the sun when he was ready to show his face. A long time I sat there, and I heard no sound from the harbor except the screams of the gulls, and no sound from the land except the sound of the wind blowing among the needles of the pine above my head. And at last the gulls were gone, and the sun peeped out from under the edge of the ragged and scudding cloud, and I felt a gentle touch upon my arm. And I turned my head and looked, and there was Pukkie; Pukkie, my little son, my well-beloved.

I put both arms around him, and I hugged him