One evening, about twilight, I walked through the graveyard, and stood leaning against her tombstone.  I soon knew that she was coming, for I heard the ringing sound in the air which always came before her.  A moment after, she stood beside me.  She placed her hand on my heart, and said, “Joseph, all is right here,”—­then upon my forehead, and said, “But here all is wrong.”

Then she told me there was a ship ready to sail from Boston, and that I must go in her,—­said it troubled her that I wasted my life so.  She gave me the name of the ship and of the captain, and told me when to go.

I did exactly as she said.  And it all came true.  When the captain saw me, he started back and exclaimed,—­“What sent you here?”

I said, “An angel.”

“And an angel told me you were coming,” he replied.

Active work saved me.  For years I never dared rest.  I shrank back from a leisure hour as from a dark chasm.

The greater part of my life has been passed upon the sea.  As I approached middle age, people would joke me upon my single life.  They could never know what a painful chord they struck, and I could never tell them.  Beautiful girls were pointed out to me.  I could not see them.  Margaret’s face always came between.

This bantering a single man is very common.  I often wonder that people dare do it.  How does the world know what early disappointment he may be mourning over?  Is it anything to laugh about, that he has nobody to love him,—­nobody he may call his own,—­no home?  Seated in your pleasant family-circle, the bright faces about him fade away, and he sees only a vision of what might have been.  Yet nobody supposes we have feeling.  No mother, dressing up her little boy for a walk, thinks of our noticing how cunning he looks, with the feather in his hat.  No mother, weeping over the coffin of her child, dreams that we have pity and sorrow in our hearts for her.

Thus the world shuts us out from all sympathy with its joys or afflictions.  But the world doesn’t know everything,—­least of all what is passing in the heart of an old bachelor.

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Jamie and Mary are old folks now.  He never went to sea after his marriage.  Father set him up in a store.  I should make it my home with them, but they live at the old place, and I am always better away from there.

Mrs. Maylie was right about my noticing children.  I like to sit on the stone wall and talk with them.  No face comes between theirs and mine,—­unless it’s the little girl’s who moved away.  Farmer Hill’s is a pleasant family.  His grandchildren call me Captain Joseph.  I humor them almost as much as he does.  When huckleberries come, they wonder why I won’t let them take that little rough-looking basket that hangs over the looking-glass.  ’Tis the one Margaret made that night in the hut on The Mountains.

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