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Maurice Keeler, wan, hollow-eyed, and miserable, was seated on a stool just outside the door in the early morning sunlight. Near him sat his mother, peeling potatoes, her portly form obscured by a trailing wistaria vine. What Maurice had endured during his two weeks with the measles nobody knew but himself. His days had been lonely, filled with remorse that he had ever been born to give people trouble and care; his nights longer even than the days. Hideous nightmares had robbed him of slumber. Old Scroggie's ghost had visited him almost nightly. The Twin Oaks robbers, ugly, hairy giants armed with red-hot pitch-forks, had bound him to a tree and applied fire to his feet. What use to struggle or cry aloud for help? Even Billy, his dearest chum, had sat and laughed with all the mouths of his eight heads at his pain. Of course he had awakened to learn these were but dreams; but to a boy dreams are closely akin to reality., "Well," laughed Wilson, "if anybody kin make Joe toe the scratch it's you, Deacon. Didn't see anythin' of Hinter on your rounds, did you?", Lower Street was not the street in which Lucy shopped. It consisted mainly of little houses with screen doors and bright brass knockers, and lozenged windows which opened and shut in the French style, so that a small piece of the window could be opened at will. These houses were the dwelling-places of pilots, sailors, and fishermen belonging to the district. In the middle of the street was a Nonconformist Chapel with a burial ground spreading out in front of it till its outer confines were half-way upon the footpath; a wonderfully tended resting-place: its billows of grass marked in most cases the silent beds of seafarers; the decoration of flower or[Pg 36] memorial was largely nautical: the anchor, the Liliputian bows of a ship as a headpiece, and here and there the headpiece was a gun. Tombstones whose inscriptions endless discharges of wet and the fretting action of the wind had rendered almost illegible, leaned as though for support in their weariness against the walls of the adjacent houses; so that a few bricks or stones might separate a row of dead men from a little parlour full of cheerful company where the fire crackled briskly, where the oil flame shook in ripples of yellow radiance upon the walls and the ceiling, where the atmosphere was good with the perfume of rum punch, and where a manly voice in an interval of silence might be heard singing a nautical ballad to the accompaniment of a fiddle..