As we sailed along I listened to an increasingly delightful commentary upon the islands, some of them barren rocks, or at best giving sparse pasturage for sheep in the early summer. On one of these an eager little flock ran to the water’s edge and bleated at us so affectingly that I would willingly have stopped; but Mrs. Todd steered away from the rocks, and scolded at the sheep’s mean owner, an acquaintance of hers, who grudged the little salt and still less care which the patient creatures needed. The hot midsummer sun makes prisons of these small islands that are a paradise in early June, with their cool springs and short thick-growing grass. On a larger island, farther out to sea, my entertaining companion showed me with glee the small houses of two farmers who shared the island between them, and declared that for three generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of sickness or death or birth. “When the news come that the war was over, one of ’em knew it a week, and never stepped across his wall to tell the others,” she said. “There, they enjoy it: they’ve got to have somethin’ to interest ’em in such a place; ’tis a good deal more tryin’ to be tied to folks you don’t like than ’tis to be alone. Each of ’em tells the neighbors their wrongs; plenty likes to hear and tell again; them as fetch a bone’ll carry one, an’ so they keep the fight a-goin’. I must say I like variety myself; some folks washes Monday an’ irons Tuesday the whole year round, even if the circus is goin’ by!” A long time before we landed at Green Island we could see the small white house, standing high like a beacon, where Mrs. Todd was born and where her mother lived, on a green slope above the water, with dark spruce woods still higher. There were crops in the fields, which we presently distinguished from one another. Mrs. Todd examined them while we were still far at sea. “Mother’s late potatoes looks backward; ain’t had rain enough so far,” she pronounced her opinion. “They look weedier than what they call Front Street down to Cowper Centre. I expect brother William is so occupied with his herrin’ weirs an’ servin’ out bait to the schooners that he don’t think once a day of the land.” “What’s the flag for, up above the spruces there behind the house?” I inquired, with eagerness. “Oh, that’s the sign for herrin’,” she explained kindly, while Johnny Bowden regarded me with contemptuous surprise. “When they get enough for schooners they raise that flag; an’ when ’tis a poor catch in the weir pocket they just fly a little signal down by the shore, an’ then the small bo’ts comes and get enough an’ over for their trawls. There, look! there she is: mother sees us; she’s wavin’ somethin’ out o’ the fore door! She’ll be to the landin’-place quick’s we are.” I looked, and could see a tiny flutter in the doorway, but a quicker signal had made its way from the heart on shore to the heart on the sea.