“They say society has all gone to live at Newport in the summer,” Ali Baba would summarize. “Well, mebbe they has. All I know is this—that right here at Birge’s Lake from 1860 to 1890—for nigh thirty years, there wasn’t no place in the land that could boast of entertaining any finer. We’ve had three presidents come fishing—right there by that landing—and Patti sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in that big house over there—the one with the gables. I passed the punch afterwards—yes, sir, right up to time I was, in a new dress suit Major McAndrews bought me. I never heard nobody sing as she did—and the wimmen said her pink satin train was six feet long. Well, I’ll take that back—I have heard it sung as good and mebbe better by a girl right in this village—a nightingale girl named Thurley Precore.
“That Swiss cha-_lay_ over there was built in 1878 by Hugo Fiske—he and his bride were going to come here summers—she died the day before the wedding, and he come on here, as soon as she was buried, and stayed all alone, his wedding bags and finery stacked in the hall and never unpacked. He kept trampin’, trampin’, trampin’ through the woods and around the lake, never speakin’ to a soul. By and by, when he had walked it all out, he come to the livery and asked to be taken to the train. I happened to be handy then, and so I drove him over. When I helped him out and toted his bags, he says to me, ‘Ali Baba, tell Abby Clergy I understand’—and he never come back again.”
Here the old man would become uncommunicative, and, when the stranger would idly ask, “Who was Abby Clergy?”—all the answer would be was:
Then the stranger might suggest the danger of burglars. To which Ali Baba would answer:
“I guess you don’t know these parts—oh, we got a few burglars—robins and chipmunks and that kind.”
If the stranger asked “Why are you called Ali Baba?” looking with interest at his rosy old face, Ali Baba would bid him good-by without further ado and make his way homeward, past Birge’s Corners to Birge’s Lake to a certain red brick mansion, with every shuttered window fastened tight, save those at the back, and the gleam of lights showing from upper front windows. Ali Baba would find his way to the back of the house, tiptoeing meekly inside an immaculate summer kitchen to find his widowed sister, Hopeful Whittier, to whom he would say: