My friend, the man, told me to come on, and hurried off to meet Miss Norton. They shook hands and began to talk. I stood where I was and watched them. At last the man turned toward me and shouted:--
"Come on! Don't you want to go for a walk? We'll watch for your ship as we go."
But I shook my head. I did not intend to be drawn from my vigil as easy as that. Miss Norton did not interest me particularly--I could see her any day.
The man was apparently glad to see her; they slipped Boojum's leash, let him rush off by himself, and then started together along the sand.
He could not have had anything valuable on his ship, for he never glanced at the ocean at all.
I turned again to inspect the horizon, reflecting that it was quite different when you expected your ship to bring you a velocipede.
After all my waiting and watching I never saw the ship that fetched my velocipede. It came--during the night, I fancy--shortly after we got home from the beach.
But I had the velocipede,--that was the main thing. It was built mostly of wood, and painted red. On it, I spent four happy days, riding up and down the sidewalks of Oak Street.
Then, somehow, it got broken, and had to be sent away to be mended. This was distressing enough of itself. But it turned out to be the first of a veritable series of misfortunes.
On the same day that I broke the velocipede, the cat made an attempt on the life of my sole surviving goldfish. She had been unsuccessful, I am glad to say, and she now had to disappear over the fence with more than her usual speed whenever I came out of the house. But in her efforts she had dislodged a pail of minnows that stood beside the goldfish's residence, and a quart or more of pond-water, with fifteen unfortunate minnows, had been deposited on my bed. I was not there to distress my eyes with their dying struggles, but the household authorities had made much of the incident, dwelling quite irrelevantly on the state of the bedclothes, rather than the fate of the minnows.
Consequently I was led to believe that any more minnows would be received into the house with a coolness bordering upon absolute inhospitality.
The shocking unreasonableness of this attitude was perfectly plain to me, as I think it will be to any fair-minded person. I pointed out that neither I, nor the goldfish, nor the deceased minnows were in any degree to blame. Not the most biassed tribunal in the world, save one composed of feminine housekeepers, would ever think of finding guilty any party to the accident except the cat.