Joseph Crosby Lincoln

The story of a little orphan girl on Cape Cod who mothers the two men who would be her guardians.

Captain's inheritance infects his wife with social ambition.

Mr. Gabriel Bearse was happy. The prominence given to this statement is not meant to imply that Gabriel was, as a general rule, unhappy. Quite the contrary; Mr. Bearse's disposition was a cheerful one and the cares of this world had not rounded his plump shoulders. But Captain Sam Hunniwell had once said, and Orham public opinion agreed with him, that Gabe Bearse was never happy unless he was talking.

The little village of Three Mile Cross in Berkshire was Mary Russell Mitford's home for thirty years. She has drawn on her observations of the locality for many of her short essays, the best of which appear in this book.

"Ostable!" screamed the brakeman, opening the car door and yelling his loudest, so as to be heard above the rattle of the train and the shriek of the wind; "Ostable!"

Here is Mr. Pratt again-the jolly old Cape Cod fisherman, who manages to have more ludicrous adventures than a dozen ordinary mortals, and who tells about them in a breezy, salty fashion that is delicious. In this story Mr. Pratt by chance anchors his dory off the grounds of the Sea Breeze Bluff Sanitarium for Right Living and Rest. Almost immediately he finds himself standing kneedeep in water carrying a "hefty' squirming madien lady, while a bulldog menaces him from the shore, and a bibulous man in a rowboat threatens to cut the anchor of his dory should he try to return. However, Mr. Pratt is just the man to come out of such a situation with colours flying, and it gets him a job as handy man at the santitarium. And then the fun really begins.

It is queer, but Captain Cy himself doesn't remember whether the day was Tuesday or Wednesday. Asaph Tidditt's records ought to settle it, for there was a meeting of the board of selectmen that day, and Asaph has been town clerk in Bayport since the summer before the Baptist meeting house burned. But on the record the date, in Asaph's handwriting, stands Tuesday, May 10, 189- and, as it happens, May 10 of that year fell on Wednesday, not Tuesday at all.

The novel addresses the tribulations of Cap'n Zelotes Snow whose orphaned grandson, Alberto Miguel Carlos Speranza, comes to live with him. Speranza is the son of Snow's daughter who married a Spanish opera singer against her parent's wishes while she was away at school. The proud Cap'n Snow initially has trouble accepting his grandson, calling him a half-breed, and describing him as descended from a "Portygee", and a "macaroni-eater".