HER oldest child, a boy, was fourteen when Mrs. Guy Vanton lost her husband.

They had lived together for a little more than fifteen years. The newspapers of those years contain nothing to show or suggest what may have been wrong in their lives. If there was anything it did not show outwardly.

In the files of the Patchogue Advance, to be sure, the patient searcher might come upon a record of the death of Keturah Hand, only sister of John Smiley and a life-long resident of Blue Port. The article referred to her as the widow of Hosea Hand, who had lost his life three years earlier in an endeavour to save seamen from the wreck of a three-masted schooner, the Sirius. The Advance did not recall the details of this tragedy, no doubt because they were familiar to almost all its readers. Hosea Hand, with a rope about his waist, had gone into a maelstrom of pounding surf at the foot of the sand dunes, a maelstrom in which several dark bundles of what appeared to be water-soaked clothing were clashing about. The bundles were human flotsam,[227] three poor devils washed from the rigging of the Sirius. Before Hosea Hand could lay hold of a single one a big piece of floating timber, part of the ship’s fence, struck him. He never recovered consciousness after being hauled inshore.

The tragedy had its effect on Keturah Hand in a perceptible loss of the rude vigour which had always characterized her. She failed very fast.

Keturah Hand left more than $200,000 which passed to her brother, John, keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, and this was settled by him upon his daughter, Mrs. Guy Vanton, with whom, after he quitted the Coast Guard service, he lived until his death. The closing years of John Smiley’s life were years of quiet happiness. He had a comfortable home, he had his daughter, and he had about him her four children. The oldest was named for him—John Smiley Vanton.

The father of the............