Capn Abe, Storekeeper | Page 2

young girl should attend the professor on any of his trips into "the wilds," as she expressed it. Aunt Euphemia ignored the fact that nowadays the railroad and telegraph are in Thibet and that turbines ply the headwaters of the Amazon.
Mrs. Conroth dwelt in Poughkeepsie--that half-way stop between New York and Albany; and she was as exclusive and opinionated a lady as might be found in that city of aristocracy and learning.
The college in the shadow of which Aunt Euphemia's dwelling basked, was that which had led the professor's daughter under the lady's sway. Although the girls with whom Lou associated within the college walls were up-to-the-minute--if not a little ahead of it--she found her aunt, like many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in college towns, was really a fossil. If one desires to meet the ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this stratum of humanity within stone's throw of a college. These barnacles like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their own school experiences, that went out of fashion inside the colleges thirty years ago.
Originally, in Lou Grayling's case, when she first lived with Aunt Euphemia and was a day pupil at an exclusive preparatory school, it had been drilled into her by the lady that "children should be seen but not heard!" Later, although she acknowledged the fact that young girls were now taught many things that in Aunt Euphemia's maidenhood were scarcely whispered within hearing of "the young person," the lady was quite shocked to hear such subjects discussed in the drawing-room, with her niece as one of the discussers.
The structure of man and the lower animals, down to the number of their ribs, seemed no proper topic for light talk at an evening party. It made Aunt Euphemia gasp. Anatomy was Lou's hobby. She was an excellent and practical taxidermist, thanks to her father. And she had learned to name the bones of the human frame along with her multiplication table.
However, there was little about Louise Grayling to commend her among, for instance, the erudite of Boston. She was sweet and wholesome, as has been indicated. She had all the common sense that a pretty girl should have--and no more.
For she was pretty and, as well, owned that charm of intelligence without which a woman is a mere doll. Her father often reflected that the man who married Lou would be playing in great luck. He would get a mate.
So far as Professor Grayling knew, however (and he was as keenly observant of his daughter and her development as he was of scientific matters), there was as yet no such man in sight. Lou had escaped the usual boy-and-girl entanglements which fret the lives of many young folk, because of her association with her father in his journeys about the world. Being a perfectly normal, well-balanced girl, black boys, brown boys, yellow boys, or all the hues and shades of boys to be met with in those odd corners of the earth where the white man is at a premium, did not interest Lou Grayling in the least.
Without being ultraconservative like Aunt Euphemia, she was the sort of girl whom one might reckon on doing the sensible--perhaps the obvious--thing in almost any emergency. Therefore, after that single almost awed exclamation from the professor--his sole homage to Mrs. Grundy--he added:
"My dear, do as you like. You are old enough and wise enough to choose for yourself--your aunt's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Only, if you don't mind----"
"What is it, daddy-prof?" she asked him with a smile, yet still reflective.
"Why, if you don't mind," repeated the professor, "I'd rather you didn't inform me where you decide to spend your summer until I am off. I--I don't mind knowing after I am at sea--and your aunt cannot get at me."
She laughed at him gaily. "You take it for granted that I am going to Cape Cod," she cried accusingly.
"No--o. But I know how sorely I should be tempted myself, realizing your aunt's trying disposition."
"Perhaps this--this half-uncle may be quite as trying."
"Impossible!" was the father's rather emphatic reply.
"What?" she cried. "Traitor to the family fame?"
"You do not know Cape Cod folk. I do," he told her rather seriously. "Some of them are quaint and peculiar. I suppose there are just as many down there with traits of extreme Yankee frugality as elsewhere in New England. But your mother's people, as I knew them, were the very salt of the earth. Our wanderings were all that kept you from knowing the old folk before they passed away."
"You tempt me," was all Louise said. Then the conversation lapsed.
It was the day following that the professor was to go to Boston preparatory to sailing. At the moment of