Laughing Last

281 pp. "He who laughs last, laugh best," goes the saying. But it is a question in the Romley family who will be the last. Certainly not Sidney, though, who at fifteen asserted a strange independence and was probably the least of the famous Joseph Romley's children to look like a poet's daughter. But Sidney, determined to escape the stigma of poetry just for a summer, goes to visit her Aunt Achsa on Cape Cod. In the wharves and boats of Provincetown she finds a whole cargo of glorious adventures, including the capture of a band of ultra-modern pirates, with a five-thousand dollar reward. And, to her great surprise, she comes to play an unexpected part in sister Trude's romance, too.