Chapter 1

The Quaker children, going along toward school, paused and sniffed delighted noses. The warm air of the little Nantucket street was shot through with vigor and challenge; the breeze smelt of the purity of a thousand miles of open water. Spring was come. The boy were progressing by means of a game of leapfrog in keeping with the season. But the girls walked with a decorousness due partly to the admonition, partly to the flowing skirts, and the stays with inch-wide whale-bones, which held their childish bodies slenderly erect. All of a piece were they with the fan-topped doorways and the white picket fences which so carefully enclosed the tiny front plots.

Below them, in full view of the street's cosiness, spread the spring-lighted sea, violet-misted and endless. The children gazed toward it, but only to sight a brig, delicately small in the distance, standing round the Point.

For ships were news.

Now the children turned from North Water Street uptown along Federal, passing the open lot where, a generation later, was to be built the pretty Athenaeum. Here along the grassy space stood rows of whale-oil casks. The boys whacked them as they passed, ringing out interesting sounds, high, low, medium, each barrel a different sepulchral tone. Charming instrument for their spring mood!

"Be careful, Dionis," cautioned one little girl to her companion. "Thee flipped thy dress right against a cask. Why, there's a spot."

"Oh, dear!" Dionis looked in consernation. "Those horrid smelly things, and Mother'll punish me again."

"I'll clean it for thee. Thee come home with me after school," urged the other helpfully.

Dionis forgot to thank her, for at that moment something caught her eye, and her mind leaped off on a new interest. It was nothing more than an ivy vine growing out of a rift in a stone wall.

"Look, Hopestill," she cried, eagerly stooping to touch the hardy little thing. "Father told me something wonderful about this ivy."

"That little spindling sprig? Why, that's nothing wonderful."

"Yes, 'tis. It's grown quite a bit since Father was here. I've looked at it every time I go by. Father says it will split the stone wall wide apart, because you see it is alive."

"Alive! My pussy cat is alive, but not that thing, not really."

"Well, I guess thy pussy cat couldn't claw open the stones and the ivy can."

"That's silly, Dencey Coffyn. I don't care if thy father did say it, I'm going to ask my father," declared Hopestill. "This very afternoon."

Dionis made no answering appeal to authority. Her father was three thousand miles away on the West Coast, looking for whales. Dionis must stand upon her own feet.

"No," she maintained. "I know it. The roots..."

They turned now into State Street. Here the mild morning trading was in progress at the little stores. Sailors in their pea-jackets and floppy trousers rolled up the street and stared boredly. And here a tributary stream of school goers met the little Quaker band.

These other children came swarming up from the crowded region of docks and tidal streets - the boys of the Fragment Society School. Democratic Quakerism had yet its strata and its orders, and this was the lowest. To go to the charity school of the Fragment Society was indeed a taint. These ragamuffins knew it and were therefore brazen.

And were not these North Water Street children their special enemies, for did not these go to the newly founded Coffin School where none but ancestral Coffin blood might attend? Were they not all high-nosed aristocrats? It was a new feud but thoroughly vigorous. A low chanting of ribald song was heard:

If I was a Coffin, I'd go in the ground,
For that is the place where coffins are found.
Bury 'em deep
Or out they'll peep
Bury the Coffins deep in the ground.
Bury 'em. Bury 'em. Bury 'em.

Sons of the non-fighting Quakers turned defensively.

"Ho! Fragmenters! Fragmenters! Come on, we'll trounce ye," they yelled back, down the sloping street.

The chantey ceased. But soon a shrill Fragmenter broke out from a new quarter.

"Dionis Coffyn. Hi! Dionis Coffyn's a tomboy."

"Leave the girls be," shouted the gallant Coffin boys.

Dionis walked onward, sedate and unhearing. Surely this particular Dionis Coffyn was not the one meant. Straight shouldered, with her kerchief crossed upon her thin little chest, her gray bonnet hiding her face, her gray skirts moving voluminously forward. There in the riotous spring sunshine, she was a very spirit of quiet and serenity.

"Tomboy! tomboy!" came the cry again.

Dionis gripped Hopestill's hand.

"Does thee suppose Bob Merrill saw me climb that fence?"

"What if he did?" whispered the loyal Hopestill. "Thee had to climb to get out of the meadow."

"But I climbed worse than that." (A confession, this.) "In Grandmother Severance's garden. That tree with red blossoms. I climbed to the very top. My dress kept catching and tore in three places. I had to dip candles all next day for punishment. I hate to make candles."

"I always make the candles," said Hopestill, a trifle loftily. "I know it tires Mother, so I make them."

Hopestill was a pious child. Her parents never had to command her, she obeyed before the command. Dionis tossed her head.

"I hate candles," she said. "I don't have incomes of the Spirit like thee."

"Oh, don't say that, Dencey. Thee must have the Spirit. The Lord won't wait for thee always. Aunt Vesta said so last meeting."