And this man, an upstandin’ handsome man—­no one that knew him but spoke well of him, to me anyway, for I would not allow aught else after I come to know him.  Since that last wreck it seems to me I’ve listened to other talk of him, but that’s not so clear to me ... my brain, as I say, clouds up like on things that happened since.

No one ever met Her—­my second wife, that is—­but said she was beautiful and good—­said so to me, anyway.  It is true—­but that came afterward, like the other talk, and it’s not too clear in my mind what they did say.  But he came to me and I liked him.  And he liked me, too ...  I think he did.  He’d heard of me, he said, and would I examine his yacht—­the Rameses that was—­to see if any damage had been done—­she’d grounded comin’ in by Romer Shoal the day before.  There’d be too much delay to put her in dry dock, and he wanted to sail soon’s could be—­if she was sound—­on her regular winter West India cruise.  ’Twas in January, a fine clear day, and I said, all right, I’d send my oldest boy down and look at her.  My oldest boy—­but you know him?  Aye, a grand lad.  Both grand lads.  Modelled off their mother, the pair of them.  If I’d only a daughter like her ... the woman she was!  A wife for a seafarin’ man.  “Watch and watch I’ve stood wi’ ye,” she said, goin’—­“watch and watch, but I’m no good to see the lights nor to grip the wheel longer.  The sight’s gone and the strength, Matt.  Watchmate, bunkmate, and shipmate I’ve been to ye, but ye’re in smooth water now ... and no longer ye’ll need me.”  A daughter to stand by you she’d be.  All my money I’d give for one such.

And while he was in the office She came in.  “Ah-h!” he said—­and then, “Your daughter, captain?” I said, “No—­my wife,” maybe o’er-proudly.  I was not ashamed of my years, for it’s not years but age—­leastwise so I’d always held—­that sets a man back.  Those lads of twenty-five or thirty, I could wear them down like chalk whetstones.  Maybe she heard—­I don’t know; but she didn’t let on she did.  My proud days those were—­my office in the big building by the Battery.  You remember?  Aye, a grand place—­the name in fine letters on the door, and on the window the picture of my big wreckin’-tug, the best-geared afloat and cost the most—­a sailor’s fortune just in her—­yes—­and I’d named it for Her.  And ’twas to that same office I used often to come straight from my rough seawork.  She used to come there to take me to drive.  Me, who’d been a castaway sailor-boy—­but I could afford all these things then.  I could afford anything She wanted.  And She wanted the fine office, and so it was fitted up with fine desks and clerks, though it wasn’t what the clerks put in their account-books that kept my business goin’.  There were those who said that I’d pay the price some day for tryin’ to carry so many things in my head, but small heed I paid to them—­and ’twasn’t in those days my memory dimmed.