ILLUSTRATIONS

My boy wanted to do the divin’, but ’twas me that went down

He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson

Sam made a couple of tremendous swipes, and then down went the Aurora’s captain and one of his crew

By and by he caught an answering call

After a long look I saw that he did not resume his narrative.  By that I knew that the stranger was troubling him

There she was, the Dancing Bess, holding a taut bowline to the eastward.  And there were the two frigates, but they might as well have been chasing a star

“Don’t call me a mutineer, captain—­I’ve disobeyed no order”

He said he hoped they’d meet again next day and bowed himself out

The Wrecker

Sometimes the notion comes to me while I’m talkin’ to people that maybe I don’t make myself clear, and it’s been so for some time now—­the things I see in my mind fadin’ away from me at times, like ships in a fog.  And that’s strange enough, too, if what people tell me so often is true—­that it used to be so one time that the office clerks would correct their account-books by what I told ’em out of my head.  But sometimes—­not often—­things come back to me, like to-day—­maybe because ‘tis a winter day and a gale o’ wind drivin’ the sea afore it in the bay below there.  Things come to me then—­like pictures—­wind and sea and fog and the wrecks on a lee shore.

In my business—­but of course you know—­runnin’ after wrecks, from Newfoundland to Cuba, I had to be days and maybe weeks away from home—­which was no harm when I had no more home than a room in a sailor’s boardin’-house, and no harm later with Sarah.  Even if anything happened to me, I used to feel that Sarah—­that’s my first wife—­Sarah’d still have the two lads to hearten her and keep her busy; but ’twas different with—­but there, my mind’s off again....

Maybe some things—­comforts, refinements—­I might ‘a’ practised myself in, got used to ’em like, but could I see in those early days that I’d ever have a grand home—­me who’d been cast away at fourteen—­even if I’d had time?  It was to be able to do without comforts—­to make a pleasure out o’ hardship—­that meant success almost as much as knowin’ the business.  And I did know my business in those days—­or people lied a lot.  And it always meant more to me—­the name of bein’ the great wrecker—­than all the money I made, and in those last few years I made plenty of it—­I did that.  Me who once slaved for six dollars a month as boy in a Bangor coaster.  And I mind how I used to look back and say—­or was it somebody tellin’ me?—­that ’twas a great day for me and mine when the old lumber schooner wrecked herself on Peaked Hill Bar—­because when she was hove down I was hove into a bigger world.  Once in my pride I used to cherish praise like that—­but sometimes now I’m not so sure.