Carleton, the government superintendent, sat near the door, his chair tilted back. In the doorway itself stood Miss Mary Peebles, the schoolmistress, an angular, thin, mild-eyed woman, in a rain-varnished waterproof. Even while she was taking it off, she was protesting that she was too wet to come in, and could not stop. Near the stove stooped Bill Lacey, drying his jacket. Around the walls and on the window-sills were other waifs, temporarily homeless,—two from the paraphernalia dock (regular boarders these), and a third, the captain of the tug, whose cook was drunk. All about the place—now in the pantry, now in the kitchen, now with a big dish, now with a pile of plates or a pitcher of milk—bustled Aunty Bell, with a smile of welcome and a cheery word for every one who came. Nobody, of course, had come to breakfast,—that was seen from the way in which everybody insisted he had just dropped in for a moment out of the wet to see the captain, hearing he was home from the Ledge, and from the alacrity with which everybody, one after another, as the savory smells of fried fish and soft clams filled the room, forgot his good resolutions and drew up his chair to the hospitable board. Most of them told the truth about wanting to see the captain. Since his sojourn among them, and without any effort of his own, he had filled the position of adviser, protector, and banker to half the people along the shore. He had fought Miss Peebles’s battle, when the school trustees wanted the girl from Norwich to have her place. He had recommended the tug captain to the towing company, and had coached him over-night to insure his getting a license in the morning. He had indorsed Caleb West’s note to make up the last payment on the cabin he had bought to put his young wife Betty in; and when the new furniture had come over from Westerly, he had sent two of his men to unload it, and had laid some of the carpets himself on a Saturday when Betty expected Caleb in from the Ledge, and wanted to have the house ready for his first Sunday at home. When Mrs. Bell announced breakfast, Captain Joe, in his shirt-sleeves, took his seat at the head of the table, and with a hearty, welcoming wave of his hand invited everybody to sit down,—Carleton first, of course, he being the man of authority, and representing to the working-man that mysterious, intangible power known as the “government.”