Free That Camden Summer by Lavyrle Spencer Page B

morning.
    Pretty soon he'd put in a bathroom and some radiators, he promised himself. A modern stove, too. It was silly to have electricity and not make use of all the conveniences it could bring.
    He'd have to make time to do the work, that was all.
    Before he turned the thumb crank for the electric light, he looked the room over and found it satisfactory. Rugs neatly aligned at the sink and the back door, cupboard neat, chairs pushed in.
    just as Caroline would have liked it.
    Near eleven o'clock, with plodding footsteps, he shuffled upstairs to his lonely bed.
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    HE Jewetts got to bed well after eleven P.m., awakened late and ate boiled T
    macaroni in hot buttered milk for breakfast - the fastest thing Roberta could devise to slam on the table. Things were in such chaos that the girls couldn't find hair combs, so they took turns using their mother's. Neither could they find clean underwear or stockings so they wore the ones from yesterday. Their dresses were wrinkled from traveling, but nobody seemed to care.
    Late heading off for school their first day, neither Roberta nor the girls made an issue of it as they set out together.
    "Would you look at that," Roberta remarked, catching sight of the harbor below. "Like one of Lydia's glass floats." It had cleared overnight and the water took on so intense a blue it appeared as if the sun were lighting it from below rather than above. From three blocks up, the view was splendid. There were boats at rest beside the village docks and others heading out toward the silver-misted horizon. Some had white sails, some moved ,under steam power_, their tracks spreading behind them like lifting wings. The many islands dotting Penobscot Bay looked like nuggets of ice with the sunlight melting their tops.
    It was a noisy morning. The gulls were at it,
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    and so were the workers at the Bean shipyard below. The tattoo of their hammers joined the more musical ring from a stonecutter's shed on Tannery Lane. "Listen!" Roberta hearkened. "In my oldest memories I awakened to the sound of those hammers." Other noises of commerce drifted up the hill as well - the clatter of the electrics, the burr of boat engines and the chug-putt of motorcars. All of these notes were filtered by the April morning into a fine harmony while the earth, washed by the previous day's rains, smelled brash and black.
    Late or not, the Jewetts were enraptured by their new surroundings.
    They walked beneath an eddy of gulls who scolded continuously. Susan eyed them and scolded back. "Cree cree yourselves!"
    "Are they ring-billed?" Lydia asked.
    "No, they're herring gulls," Susan replied. Rebecca began reciting Swinburne.
    "The lark knows no such rapture, Such joy no nightingale,
    As sways the songless measure Wherein thy wings take pleasure
    "'To a Seamew,"' Roberta cocked her head and watched the birds. "A lovely choice, though these can't be mews, not on this coast. I agree with Susan. I think they're herrings."
    Rebecca said, "I hope I like my English teacher. "
    "And my music teacher," added Susan.
    "I like this town," Lydia, the pessimist, put
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    in, surprising them all. "It's pretty."
    It was a disjointed conversation but typical among the Jewetts. Their interests were so diverse that a stranger overhearing would have been addled by the quick shifts in topic.
    At the school on Knowlton Street they met the principal, Miss Abernathy, an overfed woman around forty with glasses and wavy gray-streaked hair, which she wore in a chignon. She welcomed them but at one point checked her cameo watch and noted that it was nearly nine-thirty in the morning.
    "School begins at eight, Mrs. Jewett."
    "Yes, I know," Roberta replied-, unruffled, "but we were reciting Swinburne on our way." "Swinburne?" repeated Miss Abernathy.
    "As in Algernon . . . the English poet?" Miss Abernathy put her marbled pen in its holder and smiled indulgently. "Yes, of course. I know who Swinburne is. It's not common for our students to be familiar