They walked along some time, each busied with the reflections excited by the previous conversation.

"Mort," said Rich at length, "I'm sorry, but you'll have to sleep in a poor place to-night."

"We've slept together in David Johnson's barn, in Peleg Curtis's fish-house, on a pile of wet menhaden nets, and in the woods on Great French. Didn't we make a fire and warm the ledge on the north-west side of Hope Island, sweep off the coals, and lie down—in November too?"

"Yes; but when folks go to visit their friends, they expect a little better treatment than when camping out. Don't you remember when we used to walk down to Maquoit of an afternoon in June, just before anything had faded, and it was high water, how beautiful everything looked? the sharp line of color, where the points fringed with the bright green of the thatch parted the blue water, the bolder outlines of the gray[Pg 135] rocks, and the trees reflected in the calm water; and yet go down there two or three days after, at low tide, and there would be only a hundred acres of steaming flats, the shores and the grass on their edge strown with kelp, dead clams, horse-shoe crabs, dead limbs of trees, dead fish, chips, and rotten eel grass; no water to be seen nearer than a mile and a half!"

"Indeed I do; and the contrast was so great that one must be possessed of a most devout spirit not to arraign the order of nature, and wish it was high water all the time."

"I'm sure I can't imagine what should put Maquoit Bay in my head to-night, unless it was meeting with you, and thinking of old times; but it seems to set forth my condition exactly. Six weeks ago it was high water with us, a spring tide, up over everything, clear to the grass ground, filling every cove and creek, the mouths of the brooks kissing the birch roots on the edge of the cliffs, and lifting up the strawberry leaves. Now it is dead low water, bare flats, angry sky, and to me the voyage of life seems 'bound in shallows and in miseries.'"

"That's one side, old chum" (putting his arms around Rich's neck), "but the tide only ebbs to flow again. The farther it runs off, and the more it drains out at one time, the higher it flows the next."

It was the first manifestation of anything like[Pg 136] depression that Morton had noticed in his friend. Rich, however, shook it off, as the bird shakes the dew from its plumage, saying, with a smile,—

"You are right, Mort; and that's the way I look at it generally; but I can't yet visit the old home, and come away again, without stirring up something that had better be kept down; especially when the cat puts her head in my bosom, as she did to-night, and says, 'Do stay here with me, I am so lonesome.'"

Morton, as they came in sight of the house now occupied by the Richardsons, was most forcibly struck with the contrast between this abode and the one they had just left. Their present habitation stood in a tan-yard; indeed it had, in the days of his poverty, been the residence of the owner of the tan-yard, who being pinched for room, had crowded his house into the smallest possible limits.

It was placed very near the line of the street, leaving barely space for a single doorstep, which was a pasture stone. The tan-pits at one side approached within two feet of the cellar wall. On the other was a currier's shop, leaving just space enough between the two buildings for a narrow cart road. Beneath the back windows of this shop were old oil barrels and heaps of curriers' shavings, stewing and simmering in the sun.

[Pg 137]

Directly behind the house a garden spot twenty-five feet by thirty was fenced out. It had not been ploughed for some years; the Richardsons did not care to cultivate it, as their stay was but temporary, and it was overgrown with weeds, and strewn with old boots and shoes, broken pottery, pots and pans that had outlived their usefulness, heaps of ashes, and the bleaching bones of cats that had come to an untimely end.

Abutting on this lot was a large shed, open on the side facing the dwelling in which was the "beam" house, where the green and bloody hides were received and "fleshed." Here were heaps of horns, and the pith or marrow that comes out of them when they taint. The roof of this shed was covered with glue skins, that is, the trimmings of the hides saved to make glue, spread to dry, and which attracted swarms of green flies; add to this a stagnant mill pond that supplied water for the pits, and to propel a bark mill, fences, and walls hung with sides of leather spread out to dry, and smeared, or, in technical language, dubbed, with tallow and rancid fish oil, and you have a faithful description of the sur............