The question was answered by the tooting of a naphtha-launch's whistle. The crew of the light-ship had been watching the Katie through glasses, and divining their predicament, had hailed a passing yacht, which promptly sent the launch to see the fun and assist if necessary. The assistance was gladly welcomed, and after a spirited pull and a vast amount of powerful splashing in his dying agonies, the thresher was finally got alongside and the death-blow given with a boat-hook. The boys sailed back to Newport with jubilant hearts, and their prize in tow. He was a monster of his species, measuring nearly fourteen feet from tip to tip. And the sea-gulls followed them home with cheering screams!
[THE SUMMER ANGEL.]
Everybody knows what the funny man in the daily newspapers means by the "summer girl."
She is supposed to be a giddy and frivolous creature who wears mannish or boyish clothes. She is not a fine young woman. If she has noble and womanly traits, she is supposed to pack them away carefully in tar-paper and camphor with her furs for winter use at home.
Sometimes she is amusing. Often she is pretty and bright. She is always stylish.
It was such a description that happened to fall into the hands of a real summer girl who sat leaning against a rock basking in the sun at a mountain resort, and it set her to thinking.
She had been coming to this same place ever since she could remember, and the people of the little village on the mountain-side had seen her growing, like a tall rare flower of the conservatory, taller and handsomer each year. They had watched her pass their doors, but they had not known her.
It happened that she had been reading a description of the summer girl as wearing just such a hat and gown as hers—"nobby," and "fetching," and "chic." She had the same piquant face, and was said to pass like an annual vision of beauty before the delighted eyes of the poor mountain folk whom she had seen all her life and did not know.
This was all, but it startled her. It was as if the writer had known her—from the outside. Of course he didn't know her true heart and her refined inward nature, else he wouldn't have made her talk slang and paint her face. No, it was only an accidental likeness. But it set her to thinking, and while she thought her eyes happened to fall upon the door of a log cabin upon the mountain-side beneath her. The cabin was unpainted, poor, and shabby.