Near him a little girl of seven was gathering pebbles, her heavy blonde braids touching the tawny sand whenever she stooped in her search. And crouched by his grandfather Leet was the boy Pashar, looking like an animated inkspot upon the brightness all about. His white eyeballs and teeth showed sharply by contrast with their onyx-like settings, as he sat with his thick lips agape, literally drinking in the words of the redoubtable Johnnie Strings, a wiry, sharp-faced little man, whose garments resembled the dry, faded tints of the autumn woods. Johnnie, with his pedler's pack, stored with a seemingly unlimited variety of wares, was a well-known and welcome visitor to every housewife in town. He lived when at home (which was rarely) in a hut-like abode up among the rocks of Skinner's Head; and the highway between Boston and Gloucester was tramped by him many times during the year. He owned a raw-boned nag of milk-white hue, and rejoicing in the name of Lavinia Amelia; and these two, with a yellow cur, constituted the entire _menage_ of the Strings household. Johnnie, like Topsy, must have "just growed," for aught anyone ever knew of a parent Strings. The one item of information possessed by his acquaintances was that his name was not Johnnie Strings at all, but "Stand-fast-on-high Stringer,"--an indication that he must have received his baptism at Puritanical hands. Either "Stand-fast-on-high" became more unregenerate as his infancy was left behind, or else his associates had no great taste for Biblical terms as applied to every-day use; for his real name had long since become vulgarized to the common earthiness of "Johnnie," and "Stringer" had been reduced to "Strings." He now sat upon his pack--a smaller one than he usually carried--and was saying to Leet, "Now that there be so cantankerous a lot o' them pesky King's soldiers 'bout us, there's no sayin' what day or night they won't overrun the hull country, from the Governor's house at Salem, clean over here to the sea; an' every man will be wise, that owns cattle, to sleep with one eye an' ear open, an' a gun within reach." "What are you saying, Johnnie Strings?" called out Dorothy, as she and Mary came up. "Are you trying to frighten old Leet into fits?" The little pedler sprang to his feet and snatched off his battered wreck of a hat, showing a scant lot of carroty hair, gathered tightly into a rusty black ribbon at the nape of his weather-beaten neck. "Only sayin' God's truth, sweet mistress," he answered, bowing and scraping with elaborate politeness. "I've just come from over Salem way; an' yesterday evenin' ye could scarcely see the ground for the red spots that covered it. There were three ship-loads came in yesterday, to add to the ungodly lot o' soldiers already there."