Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/300

290 day in Provincetown. When the stage was on time it got in at six o'clock; but its being on time depended on so many incalculable chances all the way along that sandy promontory, that nobody in Provincetown thought of placing any dependence on getting his letters the same night they came. Least of all did the Bennets, who lived over on Light-house Spit; they had kept the light-house for twenty-five years,—ever since Matilda, or "Tilly," as she was universally called, could remember. It was a strange life that she had led on that lonely rock,—child, girl, woman, she had known nothing else. Her father had been a sea-captain. He had had a leg broken by the falling of a mast one night in a terrible storm; had been brought into Provincetown harbor with the leg rudely spliced and lashed to a spar, and had never walked without a crutch again. The light-house was the next best thing to a ship, and Captain Bennet was glad to get it. The worse the storm, the more the old tower—none too safe at best—rocked, the happier he grew. His wife used to say:— "I believe, 'Lisha, you 'll never be contented till we break loose here some night, and go head foremost out to sea;" and the old man would reply:—

"Well, Lyddy, I 'd as soon go that way 's any. I never had any kind o' fancy for rottin' in a graveyard. The sea 's always seemed to me wholesomer; and if ye could manage it anyhow, I 'd