CHAPTER IX.
POLITICS AND BIRTHDAYS "Town meeting" was called for the twenty-first of November.
With the summer boarders gone, the cranberry picking finished, state election over, school begun and under way, and real winter not yet upon us, Bayport, in the late fall, distinctly needs something to enliven it.

The Shakespeare Reading Society and the sewing circle continue, of course, to interest the "women folks," there is the usual every evening gathering at Simmons's, and the young people are looking forward to the "Grand Ball" on Thanksgiving eve.

But for the men, on week days, there is little to do except to "putter" about the house, banking its foundations with dry seaweed as a precaution against searching no'theasters, whitewashing the barns and outbuildings, or fixing things in the vegetable cellar where the sticks of smoked herring hang in rows above the barrels of cabbages, potatoes, and turnips.

The fish weirs, most of them, are taken up, lest the ice, which will be driven into the bay later on, tear the nets to pieces.

Even the hens grow lazy and lay less frequently.