“If Loisy Currier’d heern that, you’d wish your cake was dough,” says father.

“I’ll resk it,” says Jim.  “Loisy knows who’s second choice, as well as if you told her.”

“But what about the Georges, Jim?” I asked; for though I hated to hear, I could listen to nothing else.

“Georges?  Oh, not much.  Just like any other place.”

“But what do you do down there?”

“Do?  Why, we fish,—­in the pleasant weather.”

“And when it’s not pleasant?”

“Oh, then we make things taut, hoist fores’l, clap the hellum into the lee becket, and go below and amuse ourselves.”

“How?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard it all a hundred times.

“One way ‘n’ another.  Pipes, and mugs, and poker, if it a’n’t too rough; and if it is, we just bunk and snooze till it gets smooth.”

“Why, Jim,—­how do you know when that is?”

“Well, you can jedge,—­’f the pipe falls out of your pocket and don’t light on the ceiling.”

“And who’s on deck?”

“There’s no one on deck.  There’s no danger, no trouble, no nothing.  Can’t drive ashore, if you was to try:  hundred miles off, in the first place.  Hatches are closed, she’s light as a cork, rolls over and over just like any other log in the water, and there can’t a drop get into her, if she turns bottom-side up.”

“But she never can right herself!”

“Can’t she?  You just try her.  Why, I’ve known ’em to keel over and rake bottom and bring up the weed on the topmast.  I tell you now! there was one time we knowed she’d turned a somerset, pretty well.  Why?  Because, when it cleared and we come up, there was her two masts broke short off!”

And Jim went home thinking he’d given me a night’s sleep.  But it was cold comfort; the Georges seemed to me a worse place than the Hellgate.  And mother she kept murmuring,—­“He layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, His pavilion round about Him is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.”  And I knew by that she thought it pretty bad.

So the days went in cloud and wind.  The owners of the Feather ’d been looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors afloat; and nobody mentioned Dan’s name, unless they tripped.  I went glowering like a wild thing.  I knew I’d never see Dan now nor hear his voice again, but I hated the Lord that had done it, and I made my heart like the nether millstone.  I used to try and get out of folks’s sight; and roaming about the back-streets one day, as the snow went off, I stumbled on Miss Catharine.  “Old Miss Catharine” everybody called her, though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins.  Eighty years had withered her,—­a little woman at best, and now bent so that her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn’t lift them, and she never saw the sky.  Her face to the ground as no beast’s face is turned even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would