A mile off, to the south, the line of bluffs was broken by another inlet, the entrance to Pounddug Slough.  This poetically named channel twisted and wound tortuously inland through salt marshes and between mudbanks, widening at last to become Eastboro Back Harbor, a good-sized body of water, with the village of Eastboro at its upper end.  In the old days, when Eastboro amounted to something as a fishing port, the mackerel fleet unloaded its catch at the wharves in the Back Harbor.  Then Pounddug Slough was kept thoroughly dredged and buoyed.  Now it was weed-grown and neglected.  Only an occasional lobsterman’s dory traversed its winding ways, which the storms and tides of each succeeding winter rendered more difficult to navigate.  The abandoned fish houses along its shores were falling to pieces, and at intervals the stranded hulk of a fishing sloop or a little schooner, rotting in the sun, was a dismal reminder that Eastboro’s ambitious young men no longer got their living alongshore.  The town itself had gone to sleep, awakening only in the summer, when the few cottagers came and the Bay Side Hotel was opened for its short season.

Behind the lighthouse buildings, to the west—­and in the direction of the village—­were five miles of nothing in particular.  A desolate wilderness of rolling sand-dunes, beach grass, huckleberry and bayberry bushes, cedar swamps, and small clumps of pitch-pines.  Through this desert the three or four rutted, crooked sand roads, leading to and from the lights, turned and twisted.  Along their borders dwelt no human being; but life was there, life in abundance.  Ezra Payne, late assistant keeper at the Twin-Lights, was ready at all times to furnish evidence concerning the existence of this life.

“My godfreys domino!” Ezra had exclaimed, after returning from a drive to Eastboro village, “I give you my word, Seth, they dummed nigh et me alive.  They covered the horse all up, so that he looked for all the world like a sheep, woolly.  I don’t mind moskeeters in moderation, but when they roost on my eyelids and make ’em so heavy I can’t open ’em, then I’m ready to swear.  But I couldn’t get even that relief, because every time I unbattened my mouth a million or so flew in and choked me.  That’s what I said—­a million.  Some moskeeters are fat, but these don’t get a square meal often enough to be anything but hide-racks filled with cussedness.  Moskeeters!  My godfreys domino!”

Ezra was no longer assistant lightkeeper.  He and his superior had quarreled two days before.  The quarrel was the culmination, on Ezra’s part, of a gradually developing “grouch” brought on by the loneliness of his surroundings.  After a night of duty he had marched into the house, packed his belongings in a battered canvas extension case, and announced his intention of resigning from the service.