A dozen or more grim-faced men and women were gathered in the lawyer’s office when Tobias Bassett entered. He had seen them all at the church and grave, but there had been no opportunity to greet personally the Pottses, the Bassetts and the Dawsons, names which for the most part made up the roster of Captain Jethro’s immediate family. The lightkeeper proceeded to speak to each in turn. He was of no grim disposition himself, and was sport enough in any case to shake hands with his deadliest enemy before the battle. His smile and cheerful word were for all, even for Icivilla Potts who was, of all the dead captain’s relatives, the one who considered that Tobias’s interest in the will should be infinitesimal. She had lived next door to Captain Jethro’s little box of a house for thirty years, and had kept a sharp and hungry eye upon him and his affairs during all of that time. "Yes," she was saying, "he depended upon me for everything. If Cap’n Jethro had been my own father I could have taken no more pains with him." "I don’t doubt it! I don’t doubt it!" put in Mrs. Andrew Dawson, as sharp as any sparrow. "Cap’n Jethro told me that you’d interfered with everything you could, the whole endurin’ time. He said, the Cap’n did, that you’d change the sun and moon, let alone the stars, in their courses, if so be you could!" "Haw! Haw!" chortled Isaac Bassett, a bewhiskered old man whose bleary eyes and empurpled nose told the tale of much secret tippling. "Le’s speak right out in meetin’ and tell all we know. Who’ll be the first of you women to tell how ye fished ter get the old Cap’n ter come and live with ye?" "Why, Ike Bassett! How you talk!" was the chorus of denial. "’Tis so," chuckled Isaac. "Jethro told me once that purt’ nigh every woman that was any kin to him—and some that warn’t—had offered to make a home for him. Come to think of it, though," he added, turning a bleary eye on Tobias, "there was one he said that hadn’t bothered him none that-a-way. How is your sister Heppy, Tobe?" "Wal, she ain’t no younger," said the lightkeeper, cheerfully. "Otherwise she is spry." Judge Waddams entered at this point, before the tide of family acrimony could rise higher. He was a soft-stepping, palm-rubbing man, with a bald crown and iron-grey burnsides. His clean-lipped mouth was a slit no wider than the opening of his hip pocket. Yet he was not an unsympathetic man, as his mild brown eyes betrayed. "Well, friends, we are gathered here on an occasion that I had hoped might be put off for a score of years yet. But Cap’n Jethro broke up fast during the past year, as such men as he often do. When their old hulks strike the rocks of age they go to pieces quickly. "But Cap’n Jethro took time by the forelock and made all his property arrangements in good season. He converted everything into cash—even to the house he lived in to the last—and to settle his estate is going to be a very easy matter.