As the paddle flashed and the canoe danced away over the sparkling waters of Oyster Bay, Flavilla hummed the threadbare German song which she was to sing in her rôle of Lorelei, and headed toward Northport.

There is a sandy neck of land which obstructs direct navigation between the sacred waters of Oyster Bay and the profane floods which wash the gravelly shores of Northport.

On the veranda of his bungalow, not very far from Northport, stood a young man of pleasing aspect, knickerbockers, and unusually symmetrical legs.

Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the fringe of woods.

"I may as well face the fact," he said, "that I, Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point, Northport, L.I., and recently in my right mind, am now, this very moment, looking at aa mermaid in Long Island Sound!" He shuddered; but he was sheer pluck all through.

"I'm Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point, Northport" "Master and owner of the beautiful but uncertain Sappho?

"I am quite sure," she said, as they sat together at luncheon on the sandspit which divides Northport Bay from the s.w. of Oyster Bay, "that you and I are destined for much trouble when we marry; but I love you so dearly that I don't care.

The man was Charles Leighton, a native of Northport, who had never gone farther from his home than to Boston, and there only to graduate in the Harvard College and Medical School.

Only a month previous to the scene above described she had arrived in Northport to obtain, as she said, a summer of quiet and sea-bathing.

I could not help listening to you: I could not help taking all your words and looks into my craving heart; and now I am yoursforgive me!" Stranger as she was in Northport, everybody trusted the frank sweetness in her face, and sought no other cause for admiring her and wishing her happiness.

At Northport she had been like sunlight to her intimates and like a ministering seraph to the poor.

As early in June as might be she obtained permission to go to the seaside, and with an eagerness which would have found the hurricane slow she flew to Northport.

A quarter of an hour later, when the clergyman of Northport passed by that spot, returning from a visit to a dying saint of his flock, no one was there.

Gloomily he returned to Northport, his headquarters, there to observe a group of grinning railroad men gathered about a great, bulky object parked in front of the roundhouse.

"By the way, I noticed when I went through Northport that you've still got that rotary where everybody can see it.

" Then Martin, heavier at heart than ever, went back to Northport.

The telephone at Northport clanged and sang with calls from President Barstow; but Martin only waved a hand in answer as he ground through with the rotary.

Ten miles out of Kansas City Martin gave the homeward-bound order for Northport, then slumped weakly into a corner.

He reached Northport, late at night, to roar at Jewel and the hot water she had heated for his frost-bitten feetthen to hug her with an embrace that she had not known since the days when her Marty wore a red undershirt.

It was Martin himself who answered the pounding on the door four hours later, then, in the frigid dining room, stared at the message which the chief dispatcher had handed him: GARRITY, NORTHPORT: