Читать книгу Jane's Island - Marjorie Hill Allee - Страница 6

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Ellen McNeill, seventeen years old and a freshman at the university the winter before, was as little accustomed to long trips on a railway train as her own grandmother would have been at the same age. Chicago street-cars, buses, the ‘L,’ and the suburban trains that carried her down to the Loop for shopping or concerts, she knew very well; and she could drive a car herself expertly; but on all of those you could stop very easily and make a change if you got on the wrong line, which you sometimes did. These trains were different. All the two hours down from Boston she had checked the names on the stations against those on her time-table, and not even her first sight of the sea itself, widespread and blue beyond a low green marsh, was allowed to take her mind from this anxious occupation.

Woods Hole, her destination, was the end of the line. That was a relief, and also the fact that there was not likely to be more than one station to be concerned about. The night before, coming into Boston, she had asked the conductor, ‘Does this train stop at the South Station?’ and had been answered grimly, ‘There’ll be a terrible commotion in Dewey Square if it don’t, ma’am.’ At this Ellen had subsided back into her corner, very pink and too embarrassed to note how pleased the old conductor was to give this classic retort to a familiar question.

This morning she kept her own counsel and asked no questions. When the conductor called ‘Woods Hole!’ she collected her hatbox and handbag and waited patiently in her seat to see what the other passengers would do. There was no doubt as to the direction that the stream of people were taking; Ellen followed them out of the hot and dusty car and across the tracks under the train-shed, until, dodging a little motor-truck with a baggage trailer, she saw that the crowd was carrying her toward an unmistakable gangway leading into a gray-and-white steamer whose side bulked well above the roof of the train-shed, and she could see that the broad train-shed was also a wharf, though, thanks to the crowds and the steamer, little was to be seen of the water.

‘I’m not going on a boat,’ Ellen reproved herself. ‘Where am I going? This must be the right place, because the train would run right off into the ocean if it went any farther.’

Now that she was traveling on her own two feet, she felt much more confident; she stood still, breathing with enjoyment the clean cool air, until through the thinning crowd she saw a station quite on the other side of the train she had left, and in its direction she proceeded, around the nose of the resting engine.

Propped against a post on the farther platform waited with resigned patience a young person of some twelve years, but small for her age, and chiefly notable for an extremely curly dark crop of hair, brown skin, and faded khaki shorts and shirt. When she caught Ellen’s interested eye, she came warily forward.

‘Are you Miss McNeill?’ she asked. ‘Our Miss McNeill was coming on this train and Mother told me to meet her.’

‘I’m Ellen McNeill,’ the older girl answered. ‘Can you be Jane Thomas?’

‘I’m Jane,’ the other answered briefly, and to Ellen’s great surprise she dipped in a dancing-school curtsy and put out a limp sunburnt hand. Manners thus being disposed of, she picked up Ellen’s hatbox.

‘I suppose you want to go right home,’ she remarked, without enthusiasm. ‘Mother said you would.’

‘Is there something else you would rather do?’

‘Not if you want to go home,’ answered Jane with stern politeness. ‘Personally, I always stay to watch the boat off.’

‘Well, then, personally, I’d like to stay to watch the boat off, too,’ Ellen assured her. ‘I nearly walked onto the boat from the train. Where should I have gone?’

‘Nantucket,’ said Jane. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it.’ She dodged around the train, with Ellen following. ‘Let’s stand here and watch the freight loading.’ Her serious face was full of alert interest as she watched each little motor bring up its trailer of boxes and barrels, trundle them across the gangway into the broad hold of the ship, and leave them stowed tidily there while it traveled off for more freight.

‘I wouldn’t like Nantucket?’ Ellen exclaimed. ‘Why not?’

‘Oh, just between boats or overnight it’s all right,’ Jane explained loftily. ‘But it’s very dull; nobody but summer people go there. The Nantucketers don’t go whaling any more, you know.’

‘Oh!’ said Ellen. ‘Don’t you call yourselves summer people down here at Woods Hole?’ she inquired presently with some curiosity. ‘I thought that you lived at Jeffrey all the winter; that your father taught at Jeffrey College. Certainly I wrote to your mother there.’

Jane watched the last truck-load of mail-bags ride into the hold before she answered.

‘But we come down to work,’ she informed Ellen. ‘At the Laboratory. Summer people just play around. They don’t have any fun.’

A uniformed officer near them blew a shrill whistle, and, directly over their heads, the steamer gathered breath and answered in a fearful blast that startled even the experienced Jane. There was a final scurrying to pull in the gangways, close the railings, and loosen the thick ropes that held the steamer alongside the wharf; then the ship churned itself backward around the end of the wharf and slid off through the blue water, raising protesting wide-winged white gulls as it followed a curving channel out of the harbor.

Where it had been, Ellen looked out across the waves of its wake to low green islands not far distant.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said to Jane. ‘I never saw the sea before this morning. It’s not a bit like Lake Michigan. It doesn’t even smell the same.’

‘And you’ll be surprised to find that it tastes salty, too,’ Jane told her. ‘Jim Harrison was. He’s a friend of my brother’s and he comes from Chicago, too, but he doesn’t know you. I asked him.

‘Now, would you like to go over to the fish market? Personally, I always go there to see if they have anything new. Yesterday there was a Vineyard boat in with lobsters and one was more than two feet long. Honestly!’

‘Don’t you think,’ Ellen suggested, hardening her heart against Jane’s coaxing brown eyes, ‘that perhaps we ought to go home now? Your mother might be looking for us.’

‘She would be,’ Jane sighed. ‘And I suppose Walter is still waiting for us, unless he has got mad and gone on. Of course we don’t have to stay at home unless you are tired. Are you tired? Mother said you might be.’

‘I’m not,’ Ellen assured her hastily; ‘though I should like to wash my face.’

‘You’re pretty clean,’ Jane said kindly, ‘except for that smudge under your eye.’

She ran ahead across the busy little open square back of the station, jumped on the running-board of a battered old car parked there, and prodded the boy who was dozing over the wheel.

By the time Ellen came up, having removed the streak of coal dust as well as dry cleaning would do it, the boy was demanding indignantly of Jane: ‘What do you think I am? Your private chauffeur? I’ll bet fifty cents you went all over the fishing boats before you thought of me waiting here.’

‘Give me the fifty cents!’ said Jane. ‘I never went near the fishing boats, did I, Miss McNeill?’

Her brother, a sturdily built youth who might have been about Ellen’s age, but did not seem nearly so grown-up, left his place and came around the car to open the door for Ellen and stow her and her baggage on the worn back seat. He managed this without saying a word to Ellen, who, for her part, could hardly keep her fascinated gaze from his knees. His shapeless, grayish trousers had been adorned with a large red patch on the left knee and a green one on the right, and when his long legs moved, the patches twinkled merrily.

‘What did you say?’ she asked, suddenly aware that he was scowling impersonally across at her from under his thatch of curly, sun-bleached hair and asking a question.

‘Have you got a trunk?’ he repeated.

‘Oh, yes!’ Ellen said remorsefully. ‘Here is the check. I’m not used to trains and trunk checks. Whenever we have gone any place, we have always driven and taken our baggage with us.’

The boy took the check without comment and presently returned, carrying Ellen’s little steamer trunk, which could, by squeezing Ellen, occupy the back seat with her.

Jane had taken advantage of his absence to slip over behind the wheel. ‘Walter!’ she begged, ‘let me drive this animal home. Please!’

‘I will not,’ Walter replied with discouraging promptness.

‘I could do it just as well as you, and you wouldn’t have to go up with us.’

‘Shove over!’ her brother ordered. ‘All clear behind us?’

‘All clear,’ Jane reported. ‘Cut her!’

Ellen considered offering to drive, but thought better of it as the motor started with a great clatter, died, and then took fresh hope. The old car spun around the square, left the station behind, turned three corners in short order and then entered a narrow street that ran up hill and down under fine old trees shading low shingled cottages. The noise and the jolting were so considerable that they seemed to be going at racing speed, but when they struck a long hill the car slowed down helplessly and refused to respond to anything less than a change to low gear.

‘You had to shift!’ Jane cried triumphantly. ‘I could do better than that.’

‘We always have to go up the golf course hill in low with this animal, and you know it,’ Walter returned calmly. ‘Trouble with you, you want to do too many things a kid can’t. You’ve always been bad enough, but everybody says you’re worse than usual this summer. I should think getting stuck out by the lobster-pot would have taught you a lesson.’

‘I got the lobster first, anyhow,’ Jane defended herself. ‘All by myself. And Father says anybody can have trouble with an outboard motor.’

‘He told you not to take the boat out again by yourself,’ retorted the boy.

The conversation, though not addressed to Ellen, had an air of being intended for her information, and she listened to all that came her way above the noise of the car. It was important for her to know about Jane; taking care of Jane was her job for the summer, for which she had come all the way from Chicago to Cape Cod, and since it was her first real job she was anxious to acquit herself well at it. There was very little salary attached to it, but it promised her three months on the Cape, which she had never seen, and the hope of recommendations for another summer, when, older and more experienced, she might expect to earn checks that would dazzle her family, who had never taken their youngest daughter with the seriousness she sometimes desired. And she could already see that a summer with Jane would at least be full of variety.

Near the top of the hill the car turned into a woods road and recovered breath. A small, unpretentious house or two along the road under the trees left Ellen unprepared for the cottage before which they came to a halt. It was very new; like a city girl out for a country walk it stood in an opening on the forested slope, where its white paint and thin young grass, its little darkly green evergreens banked on either side of the front stoop, and its newly stocked flower borders contrasted oddly with the brown, leaf-covered floor of the surrounding woods from which the low white palings of the fence separated it.

Jane and Walter looked much more as if they belonged to the woods beyond as they went up the flagged walk; Ellen herself, though feeling cindery along the back of her neck, was still sufficiently fresh and smart in her city clothes to appear in place on the steps before the gleaming brass knocker.

The pleasant, worried face of the woman who opened the door at the sound of their coming cleared at the sight of Ellen. Her eyes and her hair were dark like Jane’s, and Ellen thought her very pretty and admired her immaculate cotton print.

‘Come in, Miss McNeill,’ she said cordially. ‘I heard the train a long time ago and I began to be afraid you had not come. Walter, did you wipe your feet? Will you take Miss McNeill’s things up to her room, then? Or would you like us to begin calling you Ellen right away?’

‘Do call me Ellen!’ the girl answered gratefully. ‘When you call me Miss McNeill, I feel just like a scared freshman again!’

‘—A scared freshman,’ Mrs. Thomas echoed, her eyes on Walter’s foot-scraping. ‘Jane, have you wiped your feet? Sand is so hard on the floors.’ Her attention shifted back again to Ellen. ‘We don’t want you to be scared. I could almost tell from looking at you, even if I didn’t have Miss Wells’s letter about you, that you are going to be just what Jane needs. Jane has always gone native in the summer, but never so thoroughly as this year, when she really ought to be thinking more about her appearance and behavior.’

She led the way up a shining waxed stairway into a dormered room with two narrow beds.

‘I have put you and Jane together. That is mostly for Jane’s good, but I don’t think you will mind her. She sleeps like a top. The greatest difficulty is her untidiness and you will have to keep reminding her about that. She will leave her clothes around in heaps and she will not remember to shake the sand out of her sneakers into the waste-basket at night. Sand is almost my greatest trial this summer.’

‘There must be a lot of sand around,’ Ellen ventured.

‘—A lot of sand around,’ Mrs. Thomas echoed. Ellen was to discover that Mrs. Thomas had a way of keeping her finger on the conversation by repeating the last phrase addressed to her, while her own mind ran on quite different matters. ‘What has Jane got here in this tumbler, I wonder? Whatever it is, it is smelly. I’ll take it down for Jane to put in the garage.’

She held the tumbler at a distance and lifted rueful eyebrows at Ellen. ‘I don’t know that the sand is much more of a difficulty than Jane’s animals are. I find them every place over my new house. I am going to make a rule that Jane cannot keep any of her collections indoors and you will help me enforce it, won’t you?

‘There is the bathroom, and when you are ready you may come down to lunch. I’ll send Jane up with a fresh tumbler and tell her that if she has put a dogfish in the bathtub she must remove it!’

Ellen did not take time to unpack her box entirely, but she was careful to close the lid and put it away in the closet, to shake out her oxfords over the waste-basket, and to leave the bathroom as spotless as she found it. She slipped into a fresh cotton frock that seemed suitable, twisted up her hair that had just grown out long enough to make a bun on the back of her neck, and surveyed herself in the glass, where she looked exactly as Ellen McNeill had looked in Chicago, two days before: brown hair, gray eyes, good straight nose, and a friendly mouth. She went downstairs feeling clean and glad to be alive and at the end of a journey which she had managed quite by herself.

Lunch was ready and waiting.

‘Dad not coming?’ Walter asked.

‘Jane says he told her that he would have to stay with his experiment through noon. The apparatus isn’t working well, and he wants to watch it until the experiment is ended. He asked her to bring his lunch down a little later, when he had time to eat it. Sit down, children. Ellen, you may sit opposite me.’

It was a most excellent meal, served by Mrs. Thomas with due regard that the food should be equally good to look at and to eat. Ellen would have been ashamed to eat so many fat brown baked mackerel, hot biscuits and strawberry preserves, and such a heaped plateful of green salad, if it had not been for Mrs. Thomas’s evident pleasure in her guest’s appetite. Not until the orange ice came from the refrigerator did it occur to her that Walter and Jane, aside from their keen interest in the food, did not seem to be enjoying the time spent at the table. Jane ate under pleasant but constant correction of her table manners, and their mother seemed also to be watching Walter, although she left him uncorrected for the time.

After lunch the boy disappeared at once. ‘You two had better rest for an hour,’ Mrs. Thomas said to the girls. ‘Then I’ll have the sandwiches ready for you to carry down to the Laboratory. Don’t forget to fold back your spread before you lie down, will you, Jane?’

Ellen was careful to turn down her own white spread, remembering guiltily certain times at home when she had plumped down on her bed just as it was. She wanted very much to be a good example to Jane, but she was not quite sure whether she herself was up to Mrs. Thomas’s standards.

Well filled and more tired than she had realized, she went to sleep almost at once, dimly grateful to Jane for lying so quietly across the room, her thin brown hands folded on her chest, her wide eyes fixed on the quaint flowered paper of the slanting wall opposite. Sometime later she awoke with a start, hearing a little stir in the room, and smiled sleepily at Jane, who was standing beside her bed, looking across at Ellen with some apprehension.

‘Time to go?’

Jane nodded. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you quite yet,’ she apologized as Ellen sat up and stretched.

‘That’s all right,’ Ellen assured her. She pulled the covers on her own bed taut and then kindly undertook to straighten Jane’s, and as she did so her toe struck something under the coverlid which promptly overturned and drenched her foot.

‘O-oh!’ Jane exclaimed despairingly, diving under the bed while with her left hand she fumbled for a near-by hooked rug. With her right she groped among the shadows, and recovered some tiny thing that clawed and struggled while she inspected it, mopping all the time with the rug at the puddle of water.

‘It’s my crab,’ she explained in a low voice. ‘I don’t think he’s hurt.’ She popped the creature back into the emptied tumbler and gave her attention to the wet floor. ‘It doesn’t mop up! It will leak through on the living-room ceiling, and then, oh, jiminy!’

Ellen forgot her wet foot and her duty to admonish Jane. She seized the nearest absorbent thing at hand, which happened to be her own new and most becoming coolie coat and mopped with the big soft bright-colored wad.

‘That rug is mostly wool,’ she told Jane. ‘Wool sheds water.’

‘Just as well, I guess,’ Jane remarked soberly, giving the rug a little shake so that drops of water flew. ‘Mother says her new rugs ought not to be washed.’ She looked unhappily at Ellen’s Chinese coat; the floor was almost dry and the coat was very wet. ‘Will you tell Mother?’

‘I will not,’ Ellen answered without hesitation.

‘I have a dollar,’ Jane volunteered. ‘We can take your thing, what-ever-it-is, to the cleaners.’

‘It will wash.’

‘I hope Mother won’t wonder about it.’ Jane looked at the tumbler in her hand, through whose side the agitated little crab was vainly trying to claw his way out. ‘I don’t suppose I can get this past Mother again. I’ll have to put him in my pocket and leave him out in the garage till night. Then I’ll see if I can smuggle him in again.’

This, Ellen felt, was serious. ‘Your mother told you not to bring it in?’

‘It was a sea-walnut she told me not to bring in again. I don’t mind so much about that; sea-walnuts are messy when they spill, like jelly. This is such a nice little crab I found under a rock this morning. He isn’t a bit messy and he has lost a claw that I want to watch grow back on again. I thought I would wake up and look at him in the night to see how he was getting along, just like Father does when he is running a twenty-four-hour experiment!’

Jane’s anxiety was touching; it was evident that the nervous little crab was dear to her, but Ellen felt obliged to shake her head.

‘You must tell your mother,’ she said firmly.

‘She wouldn’t let me,’ said Jane, kicking her bedpost. ‘I know she wouldn’t. I wish we lived in the old camp we used to have. Father and Walter built most of it, and there were cracks in the floor, so if you spilled anything it just ran down to the ground underneath and nobody minded—— ’

‘Girls!’ Mrs. Thomas called up the stairway.

‘Coming!’ Ellen answered, and then quickly to Jane: ‘Can you get a jar with a lid to keep your precious crab in? If you can, I’ll ask your mother myself if you may bring it up here and keep it through the night. And we’ll set it on a newspaper by your bed, and I’ll lend you my flashlight to look at it.’

‘Will you?’ Jane exclaimed. ‘Will you, really? That will be grand!’ Her face was charming when she smiled up at Ellen.

The two set out very comfortably together with the lunch for Jane’s father.

‘I told Mother we’d be gone most of the afternoon,’ Jane explained, ‘so we’d have plenty of time to fish.’

‘Fish?’ Ellen questioned.

‘Just in the Eel Pond,’ said Jane.

‘For eels?’ asked Ellen, still more surprised.

‘Well, personally,’ said Jane, ‘I just fish for whatever I get, and I never got an eel there; but I shouldn’t wonder if there might be eels. There’s nearly everything else.’

‘I should think that you would fish in the ocean,’ said Ellen. ‘Why do you fish in a pond?’

‘The Eel Pond is salt water,’ said Jane. ‘It has a channel to the harbor and the tides run in and out.’ Then, seeing that Ellen did not appear to be much more enlightened, she went on expansively: ‘The Eel Pond is right in the middle of Woods Hole; there is a street that runs around it and little streets running away from that like a starfish’s arms. You know!

‘The Laboratory is on the Eel Pond, and so is the schoolhouse, and most of the stores back right over it; and nothing else is very far away.’

Ellen looked down the long street before her, up which the car had painfully pulled in the morning. ‘Don’t you live in Woods Hole? The Eel Pond doesn’t seem to be very close.’

‘Oh, yes, we do,’ Jane answered hastily, ‘but usually we call our part of it Gansett. That’s what it used to be called when it was just woods. And this is Crow Hill where we are now. This is a good place to run!’

Her brown legs flew down the graveled path by the road, and Ellen caught the contagion and ran after her, regardless of the one or two amused people they passed; but the sun was hot in the clear June sky, although the breeze on the hill was fine and fresh, and Ellen was glad to halt soon under an apple tree where Jane had paused to greet a stately cat.

‘This is Mary Theresa,’ she introduced her. ‘See! She has six toes on each foot and so do most of her children. Mary Theresa, darling, do you have any new babies? I’ve been so busy helping Father that I haven’t had time to come see you or Mrs. Ryan.’

Mary Theresa looked up at Jane with great yellow eyes and politely removed from her hand the velvety gray paw with its six perfect toes that Jane had been proudly showing to Ellen. Then, with great composure, she walked on her way.

Jane looked after her longingly.

‘She is a nice cat,’ Ellen said with genuine admiration. Those she knew were either hungry, unwashed alley cats, or lazy, overfed indoor pets; this independent, healthy animal seemed to belong to another species.

‘All Woods Hole cats are nice,’ Jane sighed. ‘I think it’s the fish. They walk along the shore, you know, and find fish—— ’

‘Do you have a cat?’

‘No. Mother wouldn’t let me ask for one of Mary Theresa’s kittens. She said she had enough to see to this summer. And I suppose it might have eaten things out of my aquarium. Father said it might.’

Down past a green slope of lawn, to their right, a stretch of water opened.

‘That’s the Eel Pond,’ Jane announced. ‘That big brick building on the other side is the Laboratory, where we’re going; and those other buildings are Laboratory buildings, too. And there’s the wharf where we’re going to fish. Let’s hurry! Father will be hungry for his lunch.’

They were meeting more people now as they climbed the hill on which the schoolhouse stood. Ellen felt obliged to keep to a dignified rate of speed, so that Jane had time to run ahead and make a flying round of the Maypole swing while waiting for Ellen to come up. After that she confined her exercises chiefly to walking along the stone walls beside the path, which usually left her free to speak to the people who smiled at her, most of whom seemed to know her very well.

‘You always say “Doctor,” ’ Ellen remarked, steadying Jane over a rough stone.

‘Most of them are,’ Jane said. ‘Most of them are Ph.D. doctors, and some of them are medical doctors, and I suppose whatever other kinds of doctors there are. It’s always safest to say Doctor. When I was little, I used to call the Laboratory carpenter Doctor, too. He didn’t mind. He liked it.

‘Now,’ she directed, as they came past an ancient-looking building of rough pinkish granite to the new and business-like brick Laboratory, ‘I’ll take this lunch up to Father and get my fishing-lines from the drawer in his room where I keep them; and you go on down to the wharf back of the Stone House and see if there is anything for bait lying around loose. Squid is good and oysters will do!’

‘But I don’t know a squid when I see it,’ protested Ellen. ‘I never met a squid in my life. Let me wait out here and look at the water and try to get my directions straight. The sun isn’t in the right place.’

‘Well—— ’ Jane assented with some disappointment. She was back down the Laboratory steps in a jiffy, carrying a large spool wound with fishing-line and a tin can in which hooks rattled.

Ellen followed her around the Stone House and past a shingled building, both of which smelled extravagantly of preservants and very dead fish, to the wharf they had sighted from the other side of the Eel Pond. The strongly built outer section of this was floating on the waters of the pond and most of its surface was made up of a series of trapdoors. Jane began to haul these up, one by one, and peer under them. When Ellen went to help, she found the doors very heavy, covering box cages of strong wire netting let down into the water beneath, in which strangely shaped things moved about.

‘I thought some of the men might have left something out loose,’ Jane explained. ‘It doesn’t matter if it is a little dead. But there isn’t anything on top, so I must see what I can find down here.

‘I don’t want these lobsters, nor the horseshoe crabs, and they wouldn’t let me have any of these big fish. There’s a dead squid. I’ll ask up at the Supply House if we may have it.

‘Alfred says it’s all right with him,’ she reported after a flying trip to the near-by shingled building.

At the touch of her hand to the surface, the water was flooded with squid ink, but Jane had gauged the position of the dead squid accurately and brought it up out of the murk in triumph, its tentacles drooping limply over her fist.

‘It looks—it looks like a stalk of bleached asparagus bushed out at the end,’ said Ellen in fascinated dislike. ‘Look at its eyes! Think of a stick like that having eyes!’

‘It’s tough,’ Jane panted, sawing away with her pocket knife at a section small enough for bait. ‘Can you unwind the lines?’

‘Where are the rods?’ Ellen asked.

‘I don’t use a rod. Too much trouble. I just tie the end to something solid so it can’t be jerked out of my hands, and drop the hook into the water.’

Considerately, she baited Ellen’s hook along with her own, and the two sat on the edge of the wharf dangling their lines into the dark water below.

‘Why don’t we fish across the road from the Laboratory?’ Ellen asked. ‘It looked nice and clean.’ Along with the odd salty smell of the water, and sometimes overpowering it, the Eel Pond had other odors, not so pleasant and suggestive of garbage.

‘The Harbor’s too clean,’ Jane said firmly, jiggling her hook gently up and down. ‘Not half so much food for fish as there is here where everything is dumped. Folks do fish across there for cunners, but personally,’ said Jane, ‘I always fish here.’

Something was tugging at her line. She pulled it in hand over hand and brought up a small and active fish, which she viewed with pride.

‘Is that big enough to eat?’ Ellen asked doubtfully.

‘I’m not going to eat it,’ Jane replied scornfully. ‘You catch one, too, and we’ll go over and feed them to the seals.’

As if in obedience to her orders, Ellen’s line began also to quiver and she hauled up another small fish which flipped its dripping tail and sprinkled Ellen’s arm.

‘All right,’ said Jane. She scrambled up and led a roundabout way over to the sea-front. Here were two large old rambling buildings, and beyond them a stone-walled aquarium of good size, built just at the edge of the water, so that the tide could enter through iron-barred openings. Leaning over the iron railing, Ellen saw a sleek round dark head part the water and blank black eyes stare up at them. Jane worked her fish loose from the hook and tossed it to the seal, who caught it with perfect exactness; and Ellen’s went the same road. Another seal sleeping on a raft woke abruptly, raised his head and made a beautiful dive in their direction, ranging expectantly alongside the first, which had prudently swallowed each small fish at a gulp.

‘We’ll bring you some more,’ Jane promised comfortingly, and trotted back to the wharf.

‘Are those Laboratory seals?’ Ellen asked.

‘Fish Commission,’ Jane answered briefly, absorbed in sawing off another section of squid. ‘That’s Government, you know.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Ellen answered. ‘But seals aren’t fish, are they?’

Jane stopped short. ‘I thought you were in college,’ she said.

‘So I am,’ said Ellen. ‘But none of my courses have been about seals. Of course a seal doesn’t seem much like a fish, but neither does a squid.’

‘Neither is a squid,’ said Jane. ‘I guess I am going to teach you a lot this summer,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘I know you are,’ Ellen answered with conviction.

When their hooks were again baited, Jane began, ‘A seal is a mammal, just like a cow or a whale—— ’

‘A whale?’

‘I said, a whale,’ Jane repeated, with a little irritation creeping through her lecturing tone. ‘The Fish Commission people use that pool mostly for dogfish, but nearly every summer they put two harbor seals in there, too. They come from Maine. The Fish Commission isn’t our Laboratory because it belongs to the Government at Washington; but the Fish Commission people are nice and they never mind if we feed their seals. What is on your line?’

Ellen jerked it up hastily to confront a perfect gargoyle of a sea-creature. It was a curiously puffy brown-and-yellow striped beast with little brown ruffles around its protruding eyes and a neat fringe under its chin. Ellen dropped it back in a panic before it could do more than gape at her, but Jane grabbed the line and hauled it up again.

‘It’s just a toadfish,’ she assured Ellen.

‘A fish?’ Ellen demurred faintly.

‘Look at the fins back of its cheeks!’ Jane viewed it with enthusiasm. ‘They look just like fans. Keep it till I get one, too.’

Ellen watched its grim countenance, although it almost outfaced her, until Jane had caught another more ordinary fish from the apparently limitless supply along the wharf, and then they were off again to feed the seal that had missed its lunch before. Jane said she could tell them apart, though to Ellen they looked exactly alike in all their sleek wet length.

This was an occupation that Jane could enjoy for a long time; when a loud braying whistle broke loose in the village, Jane was surprised.

‘Half-past four,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think it was so late. We must hurry home if we want to go bathing.’

‘What was that?’ Ellen asked, with chills still running down her back.

‘Old Cow,’ Jane answered mischievously. ‘No, really, it was the fire whistle. There isn’t a fire now. The whistle always blows at noon and at half-past four. To keep in practice, I s’pose. It has to be loud, the Chief told me, to be heard all over this corner of the Cape. When there is a real fire, you can count up the number of whistles and tell what district it is in. I like the firemen; they have a monkey for a pet. I forgot to show it to you.’

Ellen was undeniably a little tired by this time, and when Jane suggested a short cut home she was glad to follow.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said Jane, whose curly head had bobbed in front most of the way up the hill. ‘The back yards of the houses on this side the street run up to the Gansett woods. You can’t see our cottage for the trees, but it’s close. There’s a little path up through Mrs. Ryan’s yard that we use once in a while when it’s more convenient.’

She turned up a driveway that seemed to lead only to a garage at the back of the yard, but as they approached the garage Ellen could see a footpath leading on around the building to a small gate in the rambler-covered back fence. Jane was tugging at the latch of the gate when Ellen caught up with her.

‘It’s stuck,’ she said impatiently. ‘It won’t work. We’ll have to climb over.’

‘I would not advise you to do that,’ remarked a cold voice, carefully pronouncing each word. ‘Will you kindly look at the placard, which says “No Trespassing”?’

Turning, the two girls made out dimly through the screened window of the garage the face of a man within it.

‘There has never been any sign before this,’ Jane flared. ‘Mrs. Ryan has always let us come through and welcome.’

‘How glad she must be that I have that trouble stopped,’ the slow, disagreeable voice went on. ‘Quiet for study andt for rest must I have; not a procession of noise-makers past my window.’

‘Come on, Jane,’ said Ellen, her cheeks burning. She was suddenly conscious that the wind had blown her hair about and that her dress was the worse for fish and bait; and she remembered also that she was in a strange place and not familiar with its ways.

Jane followed her sulkily, not even cheered by the sight of her friend, Mary Theresa, lying complacently on the sunny side of a huge tub of hydrangeas.

‘I won’t have any fun coming to see Mary Theresa’s kittens this summer,’ she mourned. ‘Why did Mrs. Ryan have to rent her garage to such a person? Last year two boys from Johns Hopkins lived there and I liked them; they used to give me things for my aquarium.’

Her face set determinedly. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to save all the fish I can get and put them under his window to spoil. Will you help me catch lots?’