So, in three hours after receiving it from the steamer _Siwash_, the piano was out of its casing and set safely, without a scratch on it, in a corner of Miss Grant's parlour. Jake and I never could have done it ourselves. Both of us knew that. It was Miss Grant's untiring assistance that pulled the matter to a successful conclusion. She thanked us without ostentation, as she would have thanked a piano-mover or the woodman in the city. It nettled me not a little, for, to say truth, I was half dead from the need of a cup of good strong tea and my appetite gnawed over the odour of home-made scones that the elderly, rotund lady was baking on Miss Grant's kitchen stove. All day I had been picturing visions of being invited to remain for tea, of my making witty remarks under Jake's mono-syllabic applause, looking over the photo albums and listening in raptures to Miss Grant's playing and singing. And I was sour as old cider as I descended the veranda steps, soaking, as I was, with brine and perspiration. Jake was perfectly happy, however, and all admiration over Miss Grant's physical demonstration. "Gee! Miss," he exclaimed, in a sort of Klondike ecstasy, "but you're some class at heavin' cargo. Guess, if you put on overalls and cut off your hair, you could get a fifty-cents-an-hour job at pretty near any wharf on the Pacific seaboard." I could see that Jake's doubtful compliment was not exactly relished by the lady. Nevertheless, she smiled on him so sweetly that he stood grinning at her, and might still have been so standing had not I pulled him to earth by the sleeve, three steps at a time. CHAPTER XV "Music Hath Charms--" He left me at the wharf without a word. I went into the house, threw off my dirty overalls and indulged in the luxury of a bath. Not a salt-water apology for one,--a real, live, remove-the-dirt, soapy, hot-water bath;--and it did me a world of good both mentally and bodily. I dressed myself in clean, fresh linen, donned my breeches, a pair of hand-knitted, old-country, heather hose and a pair of white canvas shoes. I shaved and brushed my hair to what, in my college days, I had considered its most elegant angle. The remainder of the afternoon and evening was my own. I was just at that agreeable stage of body-weariness where a book and a smoke seemed angels from heaven. I had the books,--lots of them,--I had tobacco and my pipe, I had a hammock to sling from the hooks on the front veranda,--so, what care had I? I chose a volume of "Macaulay's Essays" and, with a sigh,--the only articulate sign of an unutterable content,--I stretched myself in the hammock, blew clouds of smoke in the air and resigned myself to the soothing influences. I had lain thus for perhaps an hour, when a shadow intervened between the page I was reading and the glare of the sun. It was Miss Grant. She had come by the back path and, in her noiseless rubber shoes, I had not heard her.