The Phantom Yacht. Norton Carol

direction that the boy was pointing. On the other side of the point, below them, was a swamp, dense with high rattling tullies and cat-tails. It looked dark and treacherous, for, as yet, the sunlight had not reached it. About two hundred feet back from the sea stood the forlorn ruin of what had once been, apparently, a fine stone mansion.

      Two stained white pillars, standing in front, were like ghostly sentinels telling where the spacious porch had been. Behind them were jagged heaps of crumbling rock, all that remained of the front and side walls. The wall in the rear was still standing, and from it the roof, having lost its support in front, pitched forward with great yawning gaps in it, where chimneys had been.

      Dories unconsciously clung to her friend as they stood gazing down at the old ruin. “Poor, poor thing,” Nann said, “how sad and lonely it must be, for, I suppose, once upon a time it was very fine home filled with love and happiness. Wasn’t it, Gibralter? If you know the story of the old house, please tell it to us?”

      The boy cast a quick glance at the timid Dories. “I dunno as I’d ought to. She scares so easy,” he told them.

      “I’ll promise not to scare this time,” Dories hastened to say. “Honest, Gib, I am as eager to hear the story as Nann is, so please tell it.”

      Thus urged, the boy began. He did not speak, however, in his usual merry, bantering voice, but in a hollow whisper which he believed better fitted to the tale he had to tell.

      “Wall,” he said, as he seated himself on a rock, motioning the girls to do likewise, “I might as well start way back at the beginnin’. Pa says that this here house was built nigh thirty year ago by a fine upstandin’ man as called himself Colonel Wadbury and gave out that he’d come from Virginia for his gal’s health. Pa said the gal was a sad-lookin’ creature as ever he’d set eyes on, an’ bye an’ bye ’twas rumored around Siquaw that she was in love an’ wantin’ to marry some furreigner, an’ that the old Colonel had fetched her to this out-o’-the-way place so that he could keep watch on her. He sure sartin built her a fine mansion to live in.

      “Pa said ’twas filled with paintin’s of ancestors, and books an’ queer furreign rugs a hangin’ on the walls, though thar was plenty beside on the floor. Pa’d been to a museum up to Boston onct, an’ he said as ’twas purty much like that inside the place.

      “Wall, when ’twas all finished, the two tuk to livin’ in it with a man servant an’ an old woman to keep an eye on the gal, seemed like.

      “’Twan’t swamp around here in those days, ’twas sand, and the Colonel had a plant put in that grew all over – sand verbeny he called it, but folks in Siquaw Center shook their heads, knowin’ as how the day would come when the old sea would rise up an’ claim its own, bein’ as that had all been ocean onct on a time.

      “Pa says as how he tol’ the Colonel that he was takin’ big chances, buildin’ a house as hefty as that thar one, on nothin’ but sand, but that wan’t all he built either. Furst off ’twas a high sea wall to keep the ocean back off his place, then ’twas a pier wi’ lights along it, and then he fetched a yacht from somewhere.

      “Pa says he’d never seen a craft like it, an’ he’d been a sea-farin’ man ever since the North Star tuk to shinin’, or a powerful long time, anyhow. That yacht, Pa says, was the whitest, mos’ glistenin’ thing he’d ever sot eyes on. An’ graceful! When the sailors, as wore white clothes, tuk to sailin’ it up and down, Pa says folks from Siquaw Center tuk a holiday just to come down to the shore to watch the craft. It slid along so silent and was so all-over white, Gus Pilsley, him as was school teacher days and kep’ the poolhall nights, said it looked like a ‘phantom yacht,’ an’ that’s what folks got to callin’ it.