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So out comes Peter with the letter.

“Barzilla,” he says to me, “I want some characters. Know anybody that’s a character?”

“Well,” says I, “there’s Nate Slocum over to Orham. He’d steal anything that wa’n’t spiked down. He’s about the toughest character I can think of, offhand, this way.”

“Oh, thunder!” says Brown. “I don’t want a crook; that wouldn’t be any novelty to THIS crowd,” he says. “What I’m after is an odd stick; a feller with pigeons in his loft. Not a lunatic, but jest a queer genius–little queerer than you and the Cap’n here.”

After a while we got his drift, and I happened to think of Beriah and his chum, Eben Cobb. They lived in a little shanty over to Skakit P’int and got their living lobstering, and so on. Both of ’em had saved a few thousand dollars, but you couldn’t get a cent of it without giving ’em ether, and they’d rather live like Portugees than white men any day, unless they was paid to change. Beriah’s pet idee was foretelling what the weather was going to be. And he could do it, too, better’n anybody I ever see. He’d smell a storm further’n a cat can smell fish, and he hardly ever made a mistake. Prided himself on it, you understand, like a boy does on his first long pants. His prophecies was his idols, so’s to speak, and you couldn’t have hired him to foretell what he knew was wrong, not for no money.

Peter said Beriah and Eben was just the sort of “cards” he was looking for and drove right over to see ’em. He hooked ’em, too. I knew he would; he could talk a Come-Outer into believing that a Unitarian wasn’t booked for Tophet, if he set out to.

So the special train from Boston brought the “house-party” down, and our two-seated buggy brought Beriah and Eben over. They didn’t have anything to do but to look “picturesque” and say “I snum!” and “I swan to man!” and they could do that to the skipper’s taste. The city folks thought they was “just too dear and odd for anything,” and made ’em bigger fools than ever, which wa’n’t necessary.

The second day of the “party” was to be a sailing trip clear down to the life-saving station on Setuckit Beach. It certainly looked as if ’twas going to storm, and the Gov’ment predictions said it was, but Beriah said “No,” and stuck out that ‘twould clear up by and by. Peter wanted to know what I thought about their starting, and I told him that ’twas my experience that where weather was concerned Beriah was a good, safe anchorage. So they sailed away, and, sure enough, it cleared up fine. And the next day the Gov’ment fellers said “clear” and Beriah said “rain,” and she poured a flood. And, after three or four of such experiences, Beriah was all hunky with the “house-party,” and they looked at him as a sort of wonderful freak, like a two-headed calf or the “snake child,” or some such outrage.

So, when the party was over, ’round comes Peter, busting with a new notion. What he cal’lated to do was to start a weather prophesying bureau all on his own hook, with Beriah for prophet, and him for manager and general advertiser, and Jonadab and me to help put up the money to get her going. He argued that summer folks from Scituate to Provincetown, on both sides of the Cape, would pay good prices for the real thing in weather predictions. The Gov’ment bureau, so he said, covered too much ground, but Beriah was local and hit her right on the head. His idee was to send Beriah’s predictions by telegraph to agents in every Cape town each morning, and the agents was to hand ’em to susscribers. First week a free trial; after that, so much per prophecy.