NEW SCENES

"'Flow Gently, Sweet Afton' certainly gave us a sermon out of the common today," declared Uncle Joe on Sunday, after meeting. "And I believe I can see Car'lyn May's fine Italian hand in it."

"Why, Uncle Joe!" cried the little girl. "Neither of my hands is Italian. I'm 'Merican, through and through! Besides," she added thoughtfully, "most of the Italians—Dominick, the ice-coal-and-wood man, and Angelo, the fruit man, and the man that goes through our street with the ice-cream-cone cart—most always have got dirty hands. Mine never get as dirty as an Italian hand."

But at that, perhaps Uncle Joe was right about the sermon. If the Reverend Afton Driggs was influenced by the prattle of the sunny-hearted Carolyn, he was not the only one so brightened by the little girl's second coming to the Corners.

"I declare!" Mrs. Hiram Lardner was heard to say, "that young 'un gets ev'rybody on the broad grin. And she's as good as she can be. Though that ain't sayin' Car'lyn ain't a reg'lar ticket when she wants to be. I don't forget how she encouraged Amos Bartlett to taste our soft-soap that time, thinking it was a hogshead of merlasses."

In this brief visit, however, Carolyn May managed to get into no mischief of a serious nature. For one thing, a great deal of her time during the fortnight was given to Baby Carolyn Amanda. Much as she had enjoyed taking care of Baby Laird, her little cousin was a more delightful plaything than the pale lady's baby.

In the first place, Carolyn Amanda quite filled the little girl's idea of what an infant should be. She was no "skinny" baby. And she was good as good!

Then Carolyn had to call on all her old friends about Sunrise Cove and the Corners. She positively had to spend an afternoon with Chet Gormley's mother; and she took tea there as well. Mrs. Gormley's belief in the ultimate business success of her son, now that Mr. Stagg seemed to consider him of some importance in the hardware store, was more than touching. Much as Carolyn May liked Chet she realized that he was, like his mother, just a little "queer." Mr. Jedidiah Parlow observed:

"If that Chet Gormley ain't a ha'f-innocent 'tain't his mother's fault. She's been fillin' up his head with fool idees ever since he got into short pants. My soul! Does seem a pity that some boys has to have mothers at all. If they could have two fathers instead, they'd turn out some good in the world, I vow!" But, then, Mr. Parlow made out that he was a regular woman hater and could only see their foibles.

But Mrs. Gormley was undeniably silly about Chet.

"Of course," Chet's mother said to Carolyn May, eying the little girl with a birdlike slyness, "I don't s'pose Mr. Stagg's ready to make Chet a full partner in the store right at first. But I guess he's dreadful keen about keepin' Chet satisfied, ain't he?"

"Oh, I am sure Uncle Joe thinks a great deal of Chet," the little girl agreed kindly.

"Um-m! Yes!" Mrs. Gormley said, and nodded her head seriously, but a good deal like one of those automatons Carolyn had often seen in candy-store windows. "Last Christmas he raised Chet's wages a whole ha'f dollar a week and now he's promised him another raise this Fourth. That's two raises in a year."

"Isn't that nice!" exclaimed her visitor.

"And if he keeps on," said the sanguine mother, "it'll soon be cheaper for Mr. Stagg to make Chet a partner in the business than to pay him a salary."

That the woman (and perhaps Chet himself) expected the good offices of Carolyn May to help boost the boy in the estimation of Mr. Joseph Stagg, did not detract from the fact that they both loved the little girl and were delighted by having her to tea. She was regaled with the very nicest eatables from Mrs. Gormley's larder; and Prince was given a great platter of chicken bones which were really only half picked.

Chet walked home with Carolyn to the Corners after supper. It made her feel very much grown up. Never had she been escorted home by a boy before. She had to write Edna Price about it the very next day.

"Why!" gasped Carolyn May at this point. "Isn't that funny? That rhymes! I never knew before I was a poet.

My!"

The letter was signed and sent to Edna Price just as Carolyn wrote it; for, although she was rather weak in spelling, the little girl, as her mother saw, made her meaning quite plain save, perhaps, in the matter of Chet Gormley being a "boo."

And now the visit to the Corners had drawn to its end. Carolyn had had such a good time that she would have postponed, had it been her own will, the journey out of the woods, across the pleasant plains and through the rich valleys of Massachusetts, and so finally down to Rhode Island's former summer capital by the sea.

It was by no means an unadventurous journey, and the day and night they spent at Newport was long to be remembered, too. Almost anything can happen when one travels with a dog like Prince.

There was a rule of the hotel at which Carolyn and her mother stopped which forbade dogs in the rooms of the guests, and the management undertook to make them leave Prince in some part of the rear premises.

"I don't believe he'll be good down there," Carolyn May said to the white-waistcoated and very precise-looking managerial person who insisted on leading Prince away. "He never will make a mite of trouble if he is with us. He's quite used to living with us. But to be tied up—down in a cellar—Well! I just know he won't be good."

"Sorry, little girl," said the stiff and haughty manager. "But rules are rules."

When next they saw the man he was neither "stiffly starched" nor haughty looking. His white vest and immaculate shirtfront were much ruffled—and so was his temper. His black coat and trousers were a sight!

"Here!" he gasped, struggling at the far end of Prince's leash, having pounded on the door of the room in which Mrs. Cameron and the little girl were just going to bed. "Take this dog. Dog! He's a hyena! I would not turn an unprotected woman and child out of my house at this hour of the night; but I would not allow this dog to remain here over another night for anything or for any money."

Prince possibly proved his "hyena strain" by laughing just as plainly as a dog could laugh. Seeing that his little mistress and her mother were all right in this strange place, he immediately curled down on a mat at the foot of the bed and blinked his eyes at them all in an apathetic way.

"I told you," said Carolyn's small voice, "that I just knew he wouldn't be good in an old cellar."

"You may shut the door," said Carolyn's mother rather sternly to the man. "You will hear nothing from the dog for the rest of the night."

The man backed out rather abashed. But wherever they went the succeeding morning they were obliged to take Prince with them. He was persona non grata at that hotel.

It was a most delightful day, and they set sail for Block Island at the very pleasantest hour of it. The little steamer sailed out of the bay, passed the Dumplings and Fort Adams, breasting the heavy groundswell running between Point Judith on the mainland and Sands Point, the extreme northern tip of Block Island.

Lying but twenty-five miles or so from Newport, the island soon came into view; and the sun-bathed Crescent Beach and the Clay Cliffs of divers hues offered a very attractive picture to the passengers on the steamboat.

They swept past the reach of the Neck in sight of the stony beach of it and of the crescent-curled bathing beach with its sands hard enough to drive upon with a brake and pair of horses; and so around the end of the breakwater into the Old Harbour. Along the main street and up on the hills behind the little hamlet, were the freshly painted hotels and boarding houses, making a colourful picture.

Backed up to the wharf where the steamboat docked were several brakes from the larger hotels, as well as a collection of surreys and carryalls as quaint as Tim the hackman's vehicle at Sunrise Cove. The island was no place for automobiles. There was a single street-car running during the summer months from the South Side to the bathing beach and the New Harbour at the Great Salt Pond.

Carolyn May and Prince, on the upper deck of the steamboat, were deeply interested while the vessel approached the landing. The clang of the bellbuoy at the mouth of the harbour excited Prince, and the little girl was obliged to speak sternly to him to make him cease barking.

"That's not a fire engine bell, Princey," she told the excited beast. "Why! they don't have fire department automobiles 'way out here in the ocean. I should think you'd have more sense."

The men and boys who drove the buses and other vehicles were a nondescript lot in appearance; but most of them wore yachting caps and were dressed in a seamanlike way that distinguished them from the visitors to the island. One old man caught Carolyn's eager attention because of a certain physical peculiarity, if for no other reason.

His was a sturdy if undersized body. His face was tanned by salt winds and tropical sun to a deep, mahogany hue. He wore a fringe of grey beard masking his throat from ear to ear, but his lips and cheeks were scrupulously shaven. He moved smartly and was dressed neatly; and those observant persons who were familiar with his type would never have mistaken him for anything but the ex-navalman he was.

He wore a cap, on the band of which was printed "Truefelt House" and he stood beside the rear step of the bus on the roof-sign of which the name of the hotel was repeated in black letters.

Somehow his roving, humorous eye caught that of Carolyn May. It twinkled at once a friendly greeting. He waved a brown hand on the back of which, even at that distance, she could see the deep indigo markings of a tattooed pattern. He was one of the friendliest looking persons the little girl had ever seen. Even Prince smiled widely at the brown-faced man and uttered a sharp bark of greeting.

Aside from the pleasant countenance of the man from the Truefelt House and his attractive manner, there was that particular thing about him that interested Carolyn May immensely. The right leg of his breeches was rolled up more than half way to his knee, revealing the varnished, brass-ferruled end of a wooden leg braced firmly upon the wharf.

"Why," murmured Carolyn, wide-eyed, "he's a wooden-legged man! How funny! I wonder how long he has had that wooden leg and—and if it hurts him much."

It did not appear to inconvenience the man a great deal, for he got to the head of the gangplank when it was run aboard as sprily as anybody.

"Truefelt House! Truefelt House, Ma'am!" he was saying, when Carolyn May and her mother came up the plank.

A salesman with two big sample cases was just ahead of the Camerons, and he thrust the heavy valises at the wooden-legged man.

"Here you are," he said. "I'm for the Truefelt House."

"And so is the lady and the leetle gal. Am I right, Ma'am?" queried the wooden-legged man. "Lemme have your bag. That's it. You go right ahead, Mister," he added to the travelling man. "The good Lord has blessed ye with two arms and two laigs, as yet. There's the bus just ahead of ye."

Prince, in his eagerness, came near to getting his leash tangled around the man's wooden leg.

"Belay there!" sang out the bus driver. "You take a turn around that spar, dog, an' ye'll likely lay me on my beam ends. What do you call him when he's to home, Sissy?" he asked Carolyn.

"He's Prince. And if you please," said the little girl politely but with emphasis, "I'm not 'Sissy.' I am Carolyn May Cameron. And this is my mamma."

"Proud to know ye, Ma'am," said the wooden-legged man. "I'm bussin' jest now for Ben Truefelt and his marm who run the Truefelt House since his dad died. I'm Ozias Littlefield. One o' the 'riginal Littlefields. They moved on to this island while the Injuns was still here, an' helped cut down all the timber so's to ketch an' kill the savages the better, I cal'late.

"You git right aboard, Ma'am," he added, helping Mrs. Cameron up the rear step of the bus after the salesman. "Yaas'm; you can give me your checks. A man with two laigs'll come down after the trunks when them deckhan's of Cap'n Ball set 'em off on to the wharf. You'm welcome, I am sure, Ma'am."

"Now, leetle gal," he added, "you want to ride on the front seat with me?"

"Oh!" and Carolyn's eyes danced. "But there's Prince."

"He can ride up there, too," declared Mr. Littlefield, and stubbed around to the front of the bus. He lifted Carolyn up on to the high seat, and grabbing Prince by the collar and his stump of a tail, tossed him sprawling after her.

"Make him sit up side o' ye, leetle gal," said Mr. Littlefield, and, securing the lines from the backs of the patient horses, began clambering up himself. "I ain't so graceful as one o' these here gazelles they tell about," he added. "I'm more like a crab—look one way and travel t'other. But I manage to git there."

He ended, puffing a little, and falling upon the hard cushion of the seat with his left foot on the brake release and the wooden leg sticking straight out over the fat back of the nigh horse.

"All right astarn?" he called. "For we're goin' to cast off."

"All clear here, Skipper," said the salesman. "You can haul up your mudhook."

"And you can haul in your slack," retorted the wooden-legged man. "I remember you from a previous v'y'ge, young man. I dunno as Mr. Ben'll want you an' your bags at all at the Truefelt House after you fillin' the sugar bowls out'n the salt crock and the salt cellars vice varsy. Fun is fun; but some people's idee of fun ought to bring 'em to the gallus.

"Come up, Trouble! Hi, Worry! Shack along now. I guess we don't git no more passengers this tide."

The fat, sleek horses awoke and ambled through the broad esplanade before the docks. Carolyn was greatly interested in all she saw; but particularly was she interested in the wooden-legged man and how he came to have a wooden leg.

The horses, Worry and Trouble, drew the bus across the main street, along the landward side of which were set most of the hamlet's shops, the post-office, and some of the smaller hotels; while the other side of the street dropped easily away to the harbour beach. They rattled through a lane where the occupants of the fishermen's cottages could almost shake hands from opposite doorstones; and then up a little green rise into the premises of the Truefelt House—a sprawling frame building with a porch on two sides and a big cupola on the roof with a quarterdeck-walk outside the cupola.

Captain Solon Truefelt, who had built the house when he retired from the sea, had still to pace his quarterdeck in all weathers. From the cupola he could overlook the whole island and the surrounding seas through an old-fashioned jointed telescope, that still hung in beckets up in the glass-encased hut on the roof-top.

The Truefelt House was comfortably and well built, and had been modernized to meet the requirements of the present generation of summer visitors. Captain Solon's daughter-in-law and his grandson now managed the hotel to much better advantage than had the old sea captain; and the Truefelt fortunes were on the march.

Mr. Littlefield hopped down sprily, having halted Worry and Trouble before the main entrance of the hotel, and lifted down Carolyn. There was a sprinkling of guests on the porch who showed the usual vague interest of summering people in the arrival of additional guests. The little girl and the dog perhaps attracted rather unfavourable comment in some quarters. Other people's children and dogs are generally considered a nuisance.

A brisk young man, bare-headed, came out to greet Mrs. Cameron, whom he helped descend with her bag from the bus. He nodded coolly to the salesman and said to the lady:

"Your rooms are ready for you, Mrs. Cameron. I understand from your husband that he will be with us on Saturday?"

"If he is permitted," Carolyn's mother agreed, following Mr. Ben Truefelt, who had relieved her of the bag.

The little girl and Prince lingered. Carolyn was watching the wooden-legged man climbing back to the driver's seat.

"He couldn't have been born with it," Carolyn May murmured. "I wonder where he got it?"