Aunt Dorcas was actually trembling as she descended from the carriage, Joe assisting her in the same manner he had seen Mr. Raymond, and the cheers which greeted her did not tend to make the little woman any more comfortable in mind. The princess's father would have sent his carriage the entire distance but for the fact that aunt Dorcas preferred to arrive at her home in such a conveyance as could be hired in Weehawken. "It is more suitable," she had said. "While I enjoyed every inch of the ride this morning, I could not help feeling as if we were wearing altogether too fine feathers for working people." Plums's friends insisted on crossing the ferry with him, and during the passage aunt Dorcas was presented to each in turn, a proceeding which entirely allayed her fears lest they would create an "unseemly disturbance." "I know I should come to like every one of them," she whispered to Joe, "and before we go ashore you must invite them out to the cottage for a whole day." "They'd scare the neighbours, aunt Dorcas," Joe said, with a laugh, and the little woman replied, quite sharply: "Mr. McArthur is the only one who would hear the noise, and if I have not complained because his dogs howled around the cottage night after night these twenty years, I guess he can stand the strain one day." Joe repeated aunt Dorcas's invitation while the boat was entering the slip, and when the little woman went on shore, the cheers which came from twenty pairs of stout lungs drowned all other sounds. "Walk quickly, boys," she said, forced to speak very loud, because of the tumult. "Your friends mean well, I have no doubt; but they are making a perfect spectacle of us." It was not possible for the little woman to walk so rapidly but that she heard distinctly, when at some distance from the ferry-slip, Jerry Hayes's shrill voice, as he cried: "Now, fellers, give her three more, an' a tiger for the princess an' Joe Potter!" [Illustration] End of Project Gutenberg's The Princess and Joe Potter, by James Otis