While waiting for the bay to freeze smooth, or clear from further thaws, Cap’n Smiley had some uneasy moments. He had never taken Mermaid to his sister’s and he did not like the idea. She had seen the little girl; had met him walking with Mermaid on the streets of Blue Port; had stopped to exchange a frosty word or two and then had walked on, ignoring the child completely. What could she be up to now? He was so uneasy that he raised the question, in a guarded way, with Ho Ha. He could do this, for Ho Ha knew all about his sister, and without actually saying very much, both could say a good deal. “My opinion she has some proposition to lay before you,” commented Ho Ha. “I don’t care to consider propositions,” replied the keeper. Ho Ha drew his weathered cheek together with his fingers. “It might advantage Mermaid some way,” he suggested. The keeper made a motion indicative of distrust. About a week elapsed before the bay froze hard. Mermaid, in many layers of wool, with a red muffler about her throat, trotted down to the bayside where her Dad put her in the scooter. Then as the odd little craft gathered way, he half reclined so as to steer with her jib and roll about handily to ballast her. They shot along at a mile a minute or better. The air was like impalpable ice pressing against Mermaid’s small cheeks and roaring in her ears. She could hardly open her eyes for the rush of tears. She shouted, but could barely make herself heard. It was all over in five or six minutes. The five-mile stretch had been crossed; Dad rounded to; the sail, so enormous a top-hamper on so tiny a potbellied body, came down, and they were off Blue Port, with only a little way to walk to tread the reassuring, if rutty, earth. Mermaid put her hand in Dad’s and they walked to the old-fashioned and heavily shuttered house where Keturah lived. She met them at the door and ushered them into the living room, which was also the kitchen, but very large, so that there was no sense of crowding. A hot fire burned in the stove, and slowly Cap’n Smiley divested Mermaid of her cocoon. It was a little butterfly of an unusual sort that emerged. Keturah, looking with a severe, impassive face at the proceeding, said at last, without altering a muscle of her face or softening her customary tone: “She looks very much as you would have looked, John, at her age, if you had been a girl.” Her brother stared at the child with a gentleness in his eyes that left them when he glanced at his sister. “Are you going to adopt her, John?” The answer came with decision. “I think I shall.” “What about her schooling?” “I shall arrange for that next year. She knows her letters.” “I’ll take her here and look after her.” The keeper was startled, but he had long kept himself in hand in the presence of his sister. “Thank you,” he paused slightly, “but I shall send her to the Biggleses’.”