The Collar-Dogs

The wedding was held on the cliff, because Linn said that nobody in that family had ever been married anywhere else and she did not see why her daughter should start being original about it now, and because Hollis, when he was asked where he would like it, had looked at the shop for a long moment with his careful eyes and said that he would like it wherever Senna's bench was, and that this seemed to be the place.

So on a bright still morning in the middle of the hot, with the sea lying flat and blue below the stair like something that had been ironed, the whole of the harbor came up the six hundred and forty-one steps in their good clothes, complaining all the way, and stood about on the narrow ground in front of the shop holding cups of Linn's cold tea and pretending they had not been out of breath at the top. The pilots came, in their dark coats with the brass buttons that they wore to funerals and launchings and nothing else. The net-menders came, and the women from the rope walk, and the harbor clerk, who was very old now and had to be helped up the last hundred steps by two of the younger pilots, and who said, when she arrived, that she had filed every true sheet that girl had ever written and was not going to miss seeing her sign the last one.