Brown, on his part, liked Seth. He had professed to like him during the conversation at the breakfast table which resulted in his remaining at the lights, but then he was not entirely serious. He was, of course, grateful for the kindness shown him by the odd longshoreman and enjoyed the latter's society and droll remarks as he would have enjoyed anything out of the ordinary and quaintly amusing. But now he really liked the man. Seth Atkins was a countryman, and a marked contrast to any individual Brown had ever met, but he was far from being a fool. He possessed a fund of dry common sense, and his comments on people and happenings in the world--a knowledge of which he derived from the newspapers and magazines obtained on his trips to Eastboro--were a constant delight. And, more than all, he respected his companion's desire to remain a mystery. Brown decided that Atkins was, as he had jokingly called him, a man with a past. What that past might be, he did not know or try to learn. “Mind your own business,” Seth had declared to be the motto of Eastboro Twin-Lights, and that motto suited both parties to the agreement. The lightkeeper stood watch in the tower at night. During most of the day he slept; but, after the first week was over, and his trust in his helper became more firm, he developed the habit of rising at two in the afternoon, eating a breakfast--or dinner, or whatever the meal might be called--and wandering off along the crooked road leading south and in the direction of Pounddug Slough. The road, little used and grass grown, twisted and turned amid the dunes until it disappeared in a distant grove of scrub oaks and pitch pines. Each afternoon--except on Sundays and on the occasions of his excursions to the village--Atkins would rise from the table, saunter to the door to look at the weather, and then, without excuse or explanation, start slowly down the road. For the first hundred yards he sauntered, then the saunter became a brisk walk, and when he reached the edge of the grove he was hurrying almost at a dog trot. Sometimes he carried a burden with him, a brown paper parcel brought from Eastboro, a hammer, a saw, or a coil of rope. Once he descended to the boathouse at the foot of the bluff by the inlet and emerged bearing a big bundle of canvas, apparently an old sail; this he arranged, with some difficulty, on his shoulder and stumbled up the slope, past the corner of the house and away toward the grove. Brown watched him wonderingly. Where was he going, and why? What was the mysterious destination of all these tools and old junk? Where did Seth spend his afternoons and why, when he returned, did his hands and clothes smell of tar? The substitute assistant was puzzled, but he asked no questions. And Seth volunteered no solution of the puzzle.