The Depot Master by Joseph C. Lincoln — Read

The following morning, at nine o'clock, Issy McKay sat upon the heap of rusty chain cable outside the blacksmith's shop at Denboro, reading, as usual, a love story. Issy was taking a "day off. " He had begged permission of Captain Sol Berry, the permission had been granted, and Issy had come over to Denboro, the village eight miles above East Harniss, in his "power dory," or gasoline boat, the Lady May. The Lady May was a relic of the time before Issy was assistant depot master, when he gained a precarious living by quahauging, separating the reluctant bivalve from its muddy house on the bay bottom with an iron rake, the handle of which was forty feet long. Issy had been seized with a desire to try quahauging once more, hence his holiday. The rake was broken and he had put in at Denboro to have it fixed. While the blacksmith was busy, Issy laboriously spelled out the harrowing chapters of "Vivian, the Shop Girl; or Lord Lyndhurst's Lowly Love."

A grinning, freckled face peered cautiously around the corner of the blacksmith's front fence. Then an overripe potato whizzed through the air and burst against the shop wall a few inches from the reader's head. Issy jumped.