“Sam?  Sartin; he’s goin’.  Him and me’s jest like the figger ten:  if yaou haul off the one we ain’t good for nothin’.  If yaou want to see a faithful friend, jest clap yer eyes on Sam Whittlefield.  And that ain’t all,” continued the skipper, looking around and speaking low.  “Ye might not think it, for he’s master-modest, but Sam’s got larn-in’ that there ain’t many in aonr taown kin grapple with.  Yaou oughter see his lib’ry.  A full set o’ the records of Congress from 1847 up to 1861; and he’d have had ’em all, only he jined the navy and couldn’t keep ’em up.  Then there’s a history by Mister Parley, and a hull secretaryfull of books of all kinds.  Oh, Sam’s literary; there ain’t no gittin’ raound that.

“Yaou might hear him speak of their son John?  Wall, he was a chip o’ the old block.  He was as wild a yonker as they make ’em; but Sam never laid the whip on him; he argued with him and eddicated him on a literary principle.  When John did anything reckless like, the old lady’d fetch aout a sartin book, called ’The Terrible Suffering of Sary Perbeck,’—­like enough ye’ve heard on it,—­and I tell ye that tuck the conceit aout of him.  She belonged to old Quaker stock of Paris, Maine, and she kept it up till John was a man grown and she lost her eyesight.  She made a good boy of him; but the poor feller went down with the rest in the gale of 1875, on the Grand Banks.  John had hard luck.  The first v’yage he made, the schooner was struck by a sea on the Banks, capsized, and rolled completely under, comin’ up the other side, so’t the men below dropped out of their bunks on ter the ceilin’, and then back ag’in as she righted.[A] The hatches were battened down, and they found John lashed to the wheel, half drowned.  The next trip all hands foundered.  They reckoned she went down at the anchorage.

[Footnote A:  The schooner Daniel A. Burnam had a similar experience in 1877.  She rolled completely over and righted herself without the loss of a man.]

“Have some beans, won’t ye?” asked the skipper abruptly, as if he had been deluded by some trick into a gloomy frame of mind and was determined to shake it off then and there.  “Them is the real New England beans,” he continued, taking a black bean-pot with a wooden spoon from the ashes.  “There’s the bone and sinner of New England’s sons right here.  I’m master-fond of ’em; never sails withaout a pot or so.  Every time I see a pot it makes me think of old Joe Muggridge, a deacon of aour taown.  He beat me once years ago in ’lection for hog-reeve; but I don’t bear no ill feelin’.  He was deacon of the First Baptist, and captain of one of the biggest coasters in aour parts, and that fond of beans that folks believed he’d ‘a’ died if he couldn’t have had ’em.  Wall, it so happened one fall that there came on a powerful gale on the Georges, and a power of hands was lost.  A good many bots got carried away from the schooners, and one dory with two men from Boothbay was picked up by one of these ocean-steamers bound in for New York, and that’s the way the yarn got told.  They’d been withaout food and water for three days, and were abaout givin’ up; but the steamer-folks tuck ’em in and steamed for port.