There was a jade Buddha which, on its first appearance in Blue Port fifty years earlier, had administered its shock to the Christian ladies of the Missionary Society, and had long been retired into oblivion. There was a collection of swords and cutlasses with which Keturah Smiley might have defended herself against all Blue Port advancing against her. On a mantel were ivory ornaments, intricately carved, and on either side of the fireplace were mammoth elephants’ tusks. Gold gleamed from damascened swords; silver bands shone more coldly from the tusks; some copper vessels on the floor dully reflected the unaccustomed daylight; but the precious stones which had once enhanced the beauty of these relics of far ports had been removed from their settings and their fires smothered forever in the feathers of a pillow on Keturah Smiley’s four-poster bed. Mermaid used to look at the empty sockets and express sorrow that all these must once have held jewels which had been lost. She took an imaginative joy in restoring them, in her mind’s eye, to their rightful places, and in deciding just what gem belonged with every background. She had a sense in these matters, and she never enshrined a diamond where a ruby should have been bleeding. Of the permanent results of their Hallowe’en pranks she apprised thirteen-year-old Dick Hand when they met at school. She told him of some of the treasures brought to light, but she said nothing of the value of them and she never spoke of the vanished jewels. She was curious, however, about the cry of pain and the whimpering that had frightened Miss Smiley on the night of the raid. Dick, who was a merry boy, laughed. “Oh, we knew she’d fire a pistol in the air; she’s done it before. I just made those noises to scare her,” he explained. Then, as Mermaid laughed with him, the boy became suddenly earnest. He looked at the girl with an air of surprise. “Say, Mermaid, you’re an awful nice girl,” he said, and looking at her he slowly reddened. In a moment he recovered himself and finished successfully, “An awful nice girl to be living with that--that--_old cat_!” Mermaid was really indignant. She told him so, and then she left him, which was not what he wanted at all. He hardly knew what he wanted. As for Mermaid, she was too incensed to be observant; she was certainly not aware that he wanted anything. The boy stood looking after her faintly dismayed, but a good deal more perplexed. Then he scratched his head, gave a whistle to another boy across the street, and sang out: “Hey, Tom! Did you find out who that new feller is on your street?” Young Tom Lupton, son of Tom Lupton of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, and therefore one of Mermaid’s cousins by courtesy in the queer relationships that sprang out of her rescue from the surf, waggled his head. “C’m over and I’ll tell you all about him,” he invited.