In summer Southport Island, as yet untainted by the tide of outing travel, was a spot to inspire dreams, poetry, and canvases covered with ocean lore. Its many coves and inlets where the tides ebbed and flowed among the weed-covered rocks; its bold cliffs, sea washed, and above which the white gulls and fish-hawks circled; the deep thickets of spruce through which the ocean winds murmured, and where great beds of ferns and clusters of red bunch-berries grew, were one and all left undisturbed, week in, week out. At the Cape, where Uncle Terry, Aunt Lissy, and Telly lived their simple home life, and Bascom, the storekeeper and postmaster, talked unceasingly when he could find a listener, and Deacon Oaks wondered why "the grace o' God hadn't freed the land from stuns," no one ever came to disturb its quietude. Every morning Uncle Terry, often accompanied by Telly in a calico dress and sunbonnet, rowed out to pull his lobster traps, and after dinner harnessed and drove to the head of the island to meet the mail boat, then at eventide, after lighting his pipe and the lighthouse lamp at about the same time, generally strolled over to Bascom's to have a chat, while Telly made a call on the "Widder Leach," a misanthropic but pious protegee of hers, and Aunt Lissy read the "Boston Journal." Once in about three weeks, according to weather, the monotony of the village was disturbed by the arrival of the small schooner owned jointly by Uncle Terry, Oaks, and Bascom, and which plied between the Cape and Boston. Once in two weeks services were held as usual in the little brown church, and as often the lighthouse tender called and left coal and oil for Uncle Terry. Regularly on Thursday evenings the few piously inclined, led by Deacon Oaks, gathered in the church to sing hymns they repeated fifty-two times each year, listen to a prayer by Oaks, that seldom varied in a single sentence, and heard Auntie Leach thank the Lord for his "many mercies," though what they were in her case it would be hard to tell, unless being permitted to live alone and work hard to live at all was a mercy. The scattered islanders and the handful whose dwellings comprised the Cape worked hard, lived frugally, and were unconscious that all around them was a rocky shore whose cliffs and inlets and beaches were so many poems of picturesque and charming scenery.