Trailing woodbine covered the fences to right and left, and along these fences grew thrifty berry bushes. Apple-trees, whereon green buttons of fruit had already set, shaded the lawn, interspersed with flower-beds edged with whitewashed rocks—flower-beds bright with hollyhocks, peonies and poppies.
Back of the house a vegetable-garden gave promise of great increase; and in the hen-yard White Leghorns and Buff Orpingtons pursued the vocations of all well-disposed poultry. A Holstein cow, knee-deep in daisies on the gentle hill-slope behind Snug Haven, formed part of the household; and last of all came the bees, denizens of six hives not far from the elm-shaded well.
But the captain’s special pride centered in the gleaming white flagpole, planted midway of the front lawn—a pole from which flew the Stars and Stripes, together with a big blue house-flag bearing a huge “B” of spotless white. This flag and a little cannon of gleaming brass, from which on every holiday the captain fired a salute, formed his chief treasures; by which token you shall read the heart of the old man, and see that, for all his faring up and down the world, a certain curious simplicity had at the end developed itself in him.
Thus that June afternoon, sitting in state amid his possessions, the captain waited. Waited, dressed in his very best, for the homecoming of the boy on whom was concentrated all the affection of a nature now powerful to love, as in the old and evil days it had been violent to hate. His face, as he sat there, was virile, patriarchal, dignified with that calm nobility of days when old age is “frosty but kindly.” With placid interest he watched a robin on the lawn, and listened to the chickadees’ piping monotone in the huge maple by the gate. Those notes seemed to blend with the metallic music of hammer and anvil somewhere down the village street. _Tunk-tunk! Clink-clank-clink!_ sang the hammer from the shop of Peter Trumett, as Peter forged new links for the anchor-chain of the _Lucy Bell_, now in port for repairs. Then a voice, greeting the captain from the rock-nubbled roadway, drew the old man’s gaze.
“How do, cap’n?” called a man from the top of a slow-moving load of kelp. “I’m goin’ up-along. Anythin’ I kin do fer you?”
