He was noted for his meanness and for his surly disposition toward all. Then why did he come there to keep a hotel? Because he had discovered that guests would come, whether they were treated well or not. The place had too many attractions of boating, swimming, sailing, and excellent fishing, winding wood-roads, and a thousand and one natural beauties, to be denied. Guests left in the fall, vowing they would not put up with the colonel’s niggardliness and petty impositions another year; but the following season found them registered there again, with the same cordial antipathy existing as before between them and their landlord. In person, Colonel Witham was decidedly corpulent, with a fiery red face, which turned purple when he became angry—which was upon the slightest occasion. “Here’s another boy come to annoy me with his noise and tomfoolery,” was the colonel’s inward comment, when Mrs. Carlin, the housekeeper, informed him that Henry Burns was coming, and was to be under her charge. So the colonel gave him the room next to his, where he could keep an eye on him, and see that he was in his room every night not later than ten o’clock, for that was the hour Mrs. Carlin had set for that young gentleman’s bedtime. Henry Burns, having in due time made the acquaintance of the Warren boys, as well as a few other youths of his age, had no idea of ending up his evenings’ entertainments at ten o’clock each and every night; so he set about to discover some means of evading the espionage of the colonel and Mrs. Carlin. It did not take him more than one evening of experimenting to find that, by stepping out on to the veranda that ran past his own and Colonel Witham’s windows, he could gain the ascent to the roof by a clever bit of acrobatics up a lightning-rod. Once there, he found he could reach the ground by way of the old part of the hotel, in the manner before described. It is only fair to Henry Burns to state that he did not take undue advantage of this discovery, but kept on the whole as good hours as most boys of his age. Still, if there was a clambake, or some other moonlight jollification, at the extreme end of the island, where Henry Burns had made friends among a little fishing community, he was now and then to be seen, sometimes as the village clock was proclaiming a much later hour than that prescribed by Mrs. Carlin, spinning along on his bicycle like a ghost awheel. He was generally known and well liked throughout the entire island.