“I can’t bear Europe just yet,” said Mildred. “I want to put letters, despatches, and newspapers even, out of reach for a few weeks; to forget immigrants, cooking schools, tenement houses, libraries, and lawyers, and all the several problems that have been besetting me these last bewilderingly busy months. “I must get time to stop and think. I want to sail idly through purple tropic seas; to skirt the green shores of volcanic islands; I want to feel for the time being that I have banished conscience and responsibility; in fact,” she added, laughing, “I want to become a pagan for a while, if I can.” “The most sensible thing that I ever heard you say,” I remarked with decision. “If there ever was a girl who has earned a vacation, it is you.” They were going on the Nanepashemet, manned by Captain Roberts, a weather-beaten seaman of Marblehead, who twenty years ago had dandled the little Mildred on his knee. He now counted it the greatest honor of his life that she had not forgotten him, and that he had been invited to take this bonny bride on his plain little sailing vessel. “Why, jest think of it, Miss,” he proudly remarked to me, “she might jest as easy hev bought one of them crack steam yachts with fancy fixins, and have gone in reg’lar Vanderbilt style. But it’s jest like her, jest like her. She wa’n’t never one of the kind to make a splurge. I knew when she got her money ’twouldn’t turn her head.” One day Ralph and I had been down to inspect the craft and attend to certain alterations in the cabin which were to be made for the accommodation of the two passengers, when the captain grew quite communicative on his favorite theme. “I knew that little chick ’ud make something when she wa’n’t no higher than that,” he remarked, holding his brown, tattooed hand about three feet above the deck. “I didn’t cal’late on her turnin’ out so mighty rich, of course,” he continued, meditatively, leaning against the rail and evidently pleased to find an appreciative listener, “but I allus knew, by the way the little thing kep’ askin’ questions about everything under heaven, that she’d got a headpiece on her that ’ud make things spin one o’ these days. Full o’ fun, too. She could swim like a duck, and row a boat with them little pipe-stem arms of hers, and yet—wal—she was sort o’ pious-like too, and allus askin’ me to tell her about my trips to the East Injies, and whether I see any women a-throwin’ their babies to crocodiles and a-bowin’ down to idols of wood and stone. “‘I tell you, Cap’n Roberts,’ that little thing ’ud say, a-settin’ there in my boat, when her ma let me take her out,—‘I tell you, when I get to be a grown-up woman I’m goin’ out there and just teach those people better.’ “‘Did you ever hear about Judson?’ says she. ‘No,’ says I; ‘was he a sea-cap’n?’