chances," said Eph, laughing; and he opened the gate and went in.

Joshua's wife, whom everybody called Aunt Lyddy, was rocking in a high-backed-chair in the kitchen, and knitting. It was currently reported that Joshua's habit of endlessly retracting and qualifying every idea and modification of an idea which he advanced, so as to commit himself to nothing, was the effect of Aunt Lyddy's careful revision.

"I s'pose she thought 't was fun to be talked deef when they was courtin'," Captain Seth had once sagely remarked. "Prob'ly it sounded then like a putty piece on a seraphine; but I allers cal'lated she 'd git her fill of it, sooner or later. You most gin'lly git your fill o' one tune."

"How are you this afternoon, Aunt Lyddy?" asked Eph, walking in without knocking, and sitting down near her.

"So as to be able to keep about," she replied. "It is a great mercy I ain't afflicted with falling out of my chair, like Hepsy Jones, ain't it?"

"I 've brought you some oysters," he said. "I set the basket down on the door-step. I just took them out of the water myself from the bed I planted to the west of the water-fence."

"I always heard you was a great fisherman," said Aunt Lyddy, "but I had no idea you would ever come here and boast of being able to catch oysters. Poor things! How could they have got away? But why don't you bring them in? They won't be afraid of me, will they?"

He stepped to the door and brought in a peck basket full of large, black, twisted shells, and with a heavy clasp-knife proceeded to open one, and took out a great oyster, which he held up on the point of the blade.

"Try it," he said; and then Aunt Lyddy, after she had swallowed it, laughed to think what a tableau they had made,—a man who had been in the State prison standing over her with a great knife! And then she laughed again.

"What are you laughing at?" he said.

"It popped into my head, supposing Susan should have looked in at the south window and Joshua in at the door, when you was feeding out that oyster to me, what they would have thought!"

Eph laughed too; and, surely enough, just then a stout, light-haired, rather plain-looking young woman came up to the south window and leaned in. She had on a sun-bonnet, which had not prevented her from securing a few choice freckles. She had been working with a trowel in her flower-garden.

"What's the matter?" she said, nodding easily to Eph. "What do you two always find to laugh about?"

"Ephraim was feeding me with spoon-meat," said Aunt Lyddy, pointing to the basket, which looked like a basket of anthracite coal.

"It looks like spoon-meat!" said Susan, and then she laughed too. "I 'll roast some of them for supper," she added,—"a new way that I know."

Eph was not invited to stay to supper, but he stayed, none the less: that was always understood.

"Well, well, well!" said Joshua, coming to the door-step, and washing his hands and arms just outside, in a tin basin. "I thought I see you set down a parcel of oysters—but there was sea-weed over 'em, and I don' know's I could have said they was oysters; but then, if the square question had been put to me, 'Mr. Carr, be them oysters or be they not?' I s'pose I should have said they was; still, if they 'd asked me how I knew—"

"Come, come, father!" said Aunt Lyddy, "do give poor Ephraim a little peace. Why don't you just say you thought they were oysters, and done with it?"

"Say I thought they was?" he replied, innocently. "I knew well enough they was—that is—knew? No, I did n't know, but—"

Aunt Lyddy, with an air of mock resignation, gave up, while Joshua endeavored to fix, to a hair, the exact extent of his knowledge.

Eph smiled; but he remembered what would have made him pardon, a thousand times over, the old man's garrulousness. He remembered who alone had never failed, once a year, to visit a certain prisoner, at the cost of a long and tiresome journey, and who had written to that homesick prisoner