eyes of a prophet,—they pitied him as a "queer feller," and left him more and more alone.
In the same years the village began to prosper. As in many other little decayed seaports, men and women from the cities began to come there in the summer, and, finding the village "quaint" and the air pleasant, came again and brought others. Thus there was money to be had for fish, and lamb, and green peas, for the simple work of sailing a boat that you had been brought up in, or, if you were a boy, of following a golf-ball over the pasture lots and learning a new game. At about the same time a shrewd Yankee came and saw the abundance of clams in the long stretches of beach at low tide, and began shipping them away by barrelfuls to Boston and New York. Since this gave work to some eight or ten men in the town, there was no ill-feeling, beyond perhaps a little envy at his cleverness. Between these two new industries, the village began to enjoy a queer kind of mouldering prosperity, so that people had no longer, in the words of
