We took the first stormy day to explore the house. To an inlander there is something magical about discovering seafaring implements and deep-sea fishing-gear of any kind about a house. You expect to find such things on ships and wharves; but when you find them high and dry, stowed away under rafters, they rouse your anchored spirit like a ship-ahoy. The corners under our roof were as full of treasures as a ship-chandler's loft: all sorts of stowaways that had been hidden for years in out-of-the-way nooks; a clam-fork under the eaves, for instance, and a net-shuttle on the sill. Up in the porch-attic, we found a wooden cradle becalmed under the rafters, left there probably when the last little Noah Smith grew too old to voyage in such small craft. Something glittered in the shadows under the hood of the cradle, and Barbara reached in to explore. She brought out a large globe of heavy glass--not a fish-globe, with an opening, but a perfect sphere. We all ventured guesses. It could not be a receptacle or lamp-accessory of any kind, for there was no entrance or exit to it, except a tiny pin-hole clogged up, at one point. Was it an ornament, or a toy, or a great lens of some kind, or perhaps a globe used by some old-time crystal-gazer? We found out later that it was a net-float--a glass buoy to bob on top of the waves, holding up a corner of the net at sea. You find them sometimes on the beach after a storm. An old glass net-float dry-docked under the hood of a cradle--we put it back where we found it. One of our fence-posts was made of a piece of a mast, our clothes-horse of teakwood washed ashore after the wreck of the Portland, our stool of wreckage from the frigate Jason; and on the end of the string to which our back-door key was fastened, there hung a large snail-shell, like a seal on a fob. But the most nautical of our possessions was the carpet on the floor of our kitchen; a carpet made of an old sail cut square and spread smoothly and painted gray--an old sail with all the wind taken out of it, spread, not this time for Java Head or Lisbon, but for our kitchen floor! "Now," said our hostess, calling us to the window, "perhaps you can understand why they call this place The Point." We looked out. The whole ocean was crowding up the valley,--foam and gulls and driftwood and all,--flooding the bed of the Pamet River. The marsh-grass and the bottom-lands, which had been solid ground two hours before, were the floor of the ocean now; the familiar winding channel of the Pamet, with its fish-weirs, eel-traps, and boundaries all submerged.