A daily stage line--an ancient carryall drawn by one sleepy horse--connected this village with the railroad. Its church bell called the faithful to Thursday evening prayer-meeting and Sunday service with unfailing regularity. Its one general store and post-office combined, was the evening rendezvous for a score of sea captains--grizzled hulks who had sailed into safe harbor here at last, and who watched the weather, discussed the visitors, and swapped yarns year in and year out. Here also, many years before, when Bayport was more prosperous, the threads of a romance had been woven, and two brothers, Judson and Cyrus Walker, born at Bayport, and sailing out of it, had paid court to two sisters, Abigail and Amanda Grey, here at Christmas Cove. It was, as such sailors' courtships ever are, intermittent. Six, eight, and sometimes twelve months marked its interims, until finally only one brother, Judson, returned to announce a shipwreck in mid-ocean, a separation of their crew in two boats, and Abbie Grey, whom Cyrus had smiled upon, was left to wait and watch and hope. In time, also, Judson and "Mandy" joined fortunes. In time, and after many voyages, during which he vainly tried to find some tidings of his brother, Judson, now Captain Walker, gave up the sea, and with wife and two young sons retired inland, purchased an abandoned farm in a sequestered valley, and began another life. Another mating had also occurred at Christmas Cove, for Abbie, the other sister and the sweetheart of Cyrus, giving him up for lost, finally consented to share the ancestral home of Captain Bemis--once a sailor and now the miller, who had exchanged the sea's perils for that peaceful vocation. His father had ground grist here for a lifetime, and passed on. His mother still survived when Abbie Grey, once the belle of the village and a boarding-school graduate, married Captain Bemis, twice her age, and her old-time romance became only a memory. No children came to fill this great, cheerless house with laughter. The old mother was laid away in due time, Abbie, once a handsome girl, grew portly and became Aunt Abbie to neighboring children, and finally all the village; and disappointed as she had cause to be, she turned her thoughts to good works and religion. But Cyrus, adrift in an open boat with half the crew, was finally rescued by a whaler, after starvation had left him almost an imbecile. A four-year, compulsory voyage to southern seas followed; then another wreck and a year on an island, and then a chance meeting with another sailor from Bayport, and from whom he learned two unpleasant facts,--first that his sweetheart, Abbie Grey, was married; and secondly that his brother had been lost at sea. One was true, of course, and somewhat disheartening to Cyrus; the other, as discomforting, but not true. It was simply a case of mistaken identity, his own disappearance being confounded with that of his brother.