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But what he had said did not suit me. "Don't talk nonsense, Jim," I said. "Don't you suppose I have thought " "Thought! that's just it; you do nothing but think. Stop thinking. Stop being a quahaug a dead one, anyway. Drop the whole business, drop Bayport, drop America, if you like. Get up, clear out, go to China, go to Europe, go to Well, never mind, but go somewhere. Go somewhere and forget it.
If those two had not met I should not be writing this to-day, I might not be writing at all; instead of having become a Bayport "quahaug" I might have been the Lord knows what. However, they did meet, at the home of a wealthy shipping merchant named Osgood who was a lifelong friend of Captain Barnabas. This shipping merchant had a daughter and that daughter was giving a party at her father's home.
He was a big, healthy, broad-shouldered fellow, a grown-up boy, whose laugh was a pleasure to hear, and who possessed the faculty, envied by me, the quahaug, of chatting entertainingly on all subjects from tennis and the new American dances to Lloyd-George and old-age pensions. Frances declared a strong aversion to the dances, principally because they were American, I suspected.
But the Christmas trade had been good and, thanks to Nathaniel's enterprise and effort, the scallop fishermen, the quahaug rakers, and the members of the life-saving crews were once more buying their outfits at the Metropolitan Store instead of patronizing Mr. J. Cohen and The Emporium. Mr.
They were what the New Yorker calls "soft-shell" clams, for a Fulton Market chowder is a "quahaug soup" to the native of the Cape. Now that chowder was good; everybody said so, and if the proof of the chowder, like that of the pudding, is in the eating of it, this one had a clear case.
"Left it to home." "Why, no, you didn't. "I tell you I did. 'Twas careless of me, I know, but " "But I say you didn't. When you went uptown after that quahaug rake I explored this craft of yours some. The compass is in that little closet at the end of the cabin. I'll get it." He rose to his feet. Issy sprang forward and seized him by the arm. "Set down!" he yelled.
To my mind the most wonderful part of the idea was that he should take my consent for granted. I talk to the Sunday school! I, the Quahaug! My knees shook even at the thought. Keturah Bangs hoped we would have a "lovely time." She declared that it had been the one ambition of her life to go sight-seeing. But she should never do it no, no! Such things wasn't for her.
That's what they used to call him round here 'The Quahaug. They called him that 'count of his keepin' inside his shell all the time and not mixin' with folks, not toadyin' up to the summer crowd and all. I always respected him for it. I don't toady to nobody neither." Hephzy had come in by this time and now she took a part in the conversation.
Hephzy has always called me "Hosy" a name which I despise and the others, most of them, "Kent" to my face and "The Quahaug" behind my back, a quahaug being a very common form of clam which is supposed to lead a solitary existence and to keep its shell tightly shut. If anything in my manner had hinted at a mysterious past no one in Bayport would have taken the hint.
A flying clam is an unusual specimen, I admit, but no other quahaug in this wide, wide world had an excuse like mine for developing wings. Hephzy did not appear to notice our silence. She chatted and laughed continuously. We had not told her our secret the great secret and if she suspected it she kept her suspicions to herself.
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