"Why, I don't think so," said the child, very innocently. "Lots of people that board here come from New York. Don't you want to see my well? I dug the deepest well of anybody to-day. Just come and see--it's only a few steps from here."
Mechanically, as one straggling with a problem above his comprehension, the financier followed the child, and gazed into a hole, perhaps a foot and a half deep, on the beach.
"That's my well," said she, "and that one next it is Frank's. Nellie's is way up there. I guess hers _would_ have been the biggest, but a wave came up and spoiled it."
Mr. Putchett looked from the well into the face of its little digger, and was suddenly conscious of an insane desire to drink some of the water. He took the child's pail, dipped some water, and was carrying it to his lips, when the child spoiled what was probably the first sentimental feeling of Mr. Putchett's life by hastily exclaiming:
The sentimentalist sorrowfully put the bitter draught away, and the child rattled on:
"If you're down here to-morrow, I'll show you where we find scallop-shells; maybe you can find some with pink and yellow spots on them. _I've_ got some. If you don't find any, I'll give you one."
Just then some one shouted "Alice!" and the child exclaiming, "Mamma's calling me; good-by," hurried away, while the broker walked slowly toward the hotel with an expression of countenance which would have hidden him from his oldest acquaintance.
Mr. Putchett spent the evening on the piazza instead of in the barroom, and he neither smoked nor drank. Before retiring he contracted with the colored cook to shave him in the morning, and to black his boots; and he visited the single store of the neighborhood and purchased a shirt, some collars, and a cravat.
When in the morning he was duly shaved, dressed and brushed, he critically surveyed himself in the glass, and seemed quite dissatisfied. He moved from the glass, spread a newspaper on the table, and put into it the contents of his capacious pockets. A second examination before the glass seemed more satisfactory in result, thus indicating that to the eye of Mr. Putchett his well-stuffed pockets had been unsightly in effect.
The paper and its contents he gave the landlord to deposit in the hotel safe; then he ate a hurried, scanty breakfast, and again sought the bench on the beach.