Mr. Neckart put back his watch in his pocket, and looked irresolutely at the captain. The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood--to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation--unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation which nobody but he could write, that must go to his paper by the next mail. He took up his hat: "It is time for you to catch the train, captain. Will you take me with you?" Captain Swendon looked at him hastily: "The very best thing you can do, Bruce! Just what I should advise.--Jane, go on before with Bruno. Mr. Neckart and I will follow." Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed with the dog. She probably would not be in his way. CHAPTER IV. Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town, there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into some yet farther region. "Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away together. Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over, with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.