Spring swept into summer; the green meadows were set off by great blooms of pink marsh mallow; the sun, shining down vertically on the white sand of the beach, caused a brilliant glare that changed, at the horizons, to a blue haze of heat. White-sailed boats moved over the five-mile width of Great South Bay, taking to and fro men in white trousers and gaily-clad women and children who might wish to spend a day at the tavern to the westward of the station, a place of ragtime music, clicking billiard balls, “shore” dinners, and home-prepared lunches. The clean sand was daily littered with empty shoeboxes and crumpled paper napkins by these family groups who picnicked between dips in the surf. Except for a few inevitable “fine swimmers” they clung, laughing and shrieking, to a line of rope tethered to a barrel just beyond the break of the waves. With the children of these beach parties Mermaid could play the day long and sometimes did; many of the visitors were summer residents of the south shore of Long Island, but not many of them had heard the little girl’s story; if they gave her any thought they accepted her as a child of one of the Coast Guardsmen. Strollers who came to the station to look at the apparatus of life saving--the breeches buoy, the life car which travelled to and from a distressed ship and the shore, the surf boat resting on its truck, and ready to be hauled laboriously through a mile or more of sand, the gun--these people would see Mermaid, but never think to ask her history. Why should they, indeed, even suppose she had one? And in telling of wrecks along the beach Cap’n Smiley generally omitted any mention of one; if he was asked about the time the _Mermaid_ came ashore he would answer quite willingly, but a specific question was necessary to elicit the most romantic and still mysterious part of that story. The keeper had many other tales unusual enough to satisfy the craving of the casual caller for a picturesque yarn. Out of his thirty years at the station he could supply episodes ranging from the ridiculous to the horrible, and many rehearsals, joined to some natural gift as a narrator, enabled him to tell his stories well. In pleasant summer weather, however, they lost much of their possible effectiveness; to appraise them at their true worth you had to hear them in winter, sitting and smoking or dreaming by the blazing stove in the station’s long living room, a lamp swinging overhead, the wind shaking the building while the sound of the not-distant surf came in to you as a thunderous and unbroken roar. On a summer’s night with all the stars shining, the wind whispering and bringing coolness from the leagues of ocean, the surf merely murmuring and--yes, the mosquitoes biting moderately--on such a night you could form no just conception of the setting in which these tales belonged.