I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike, with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse. “James used to behave himself quite well,” Mrs. Parsons would say, archly raising her eyebrows, “before Joe's time; but now there 's two boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do nothing with 'em. And then,”--with a mock gesture of despair,--“that dog!” IV. While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain that she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home. It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and went in. James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours. His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room; then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into the lean-to wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn floor where it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her face in her apron, and burst into tears. Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.