The name of Captain Bannister was potent. He lived in a house on this very lane,--a small, red-faced man with black hair. He had been a sailor, it was said, but he was a farmer now, so far as he had any occupation at all. He had no family and no servants, and he dwelt alone with a fluctuating number of cats. His house was painted white,--spotless and shining. It was without blinds, and so dazzling as to make you sneeze when you looked at it. The path up to his front door was lined, not with the usual white-washed rocks, but with large white sea-shells from some foreign country. Back of these were double rows of cinnamon pinks, the Captain's joy and pride. Once I had been taken by my elders to call on Captain Bannister. He showed us around his house,--a museum of curiosities. But of all the stuffed birds, all the spiny and prickly fishes, all the curious bits of coral and wooden ships somehow stuffed into glass bottles,--none had seemed so interesting as a small box filled with what the Captain assured me was "tooth-powder from China." That the Chinese should know and use a pink substance so much like that with which I had to struggle every morning seemed to me nothing less than marvellous. The fact had another aspect as well,--it robbed foreign travel of one of its charms. If one could wander so far and still be pursued by enervating domestic customs, one might as well stay at home. Why subject yourself to the dangers of the deep if liberty fled always before your coming? One room in the Captain's house gave me a fright. It was a small, dark apartment, a closet for size. In it the owner had chosen to place four or five lay figures in old-fashioned garments. They had dried pumpkins for heads and they sat in ghostly silence amid the gloom. There was a man with a pipe in his mouth sitting in front of an empty fireplace, an old woman, and two or three children. There was even a baby in a cradle,--its yellow, pumpkin face looking out from a ruffled cap. I did not linger there. Ever since that visit the silent family had haunted my dreams, and I more than half suspected that Captain Bannister would like to lock me up in the room with them. I did not know what advantage he would get by such an action, but its possibility seemed very near. Even on the bright morning that Ed Mason and I, walking through West Injy Lane engaged in a discussion about the old tree--even then, to me the Captain's house was an eerie place. There was no reason--aside from the pumpkin family--why it should be so. It glistened with all its usual brightness, and there was the owner himself puttering about in the little garden. Ed Mason walked up to the picket fence, bold as a lion, and addressed the captain in an easy, conversational tone. "Good mornin', Cap'n Bannister!" The sailor faced about. "Hullo, boys! Won't yer come in?... Yer needn't be afraid, I won't hurt yer."