Kitty didn’t leave our service, but played housekeeper for both establishments, returning at night to Sailor Ben’s.  He shortly added a wherry to his worldly goods, and in the fishing season made a very handsome income.  During the winter he employed himself manufacturing crab-nets, for which he found no lack of customers.

His popularity among the boys was immense.  A jackknife in his expert hand was a whole chest of tools.  He could whittle out anything from a wooden chain to a Chinese pagoda, or a full-rigged seventy-four a foot long.  To own a ship of Sailor Ben’s building was to be exalted above your fellow-creatures.  He didn’t carve many, and those he refused to sell, choosing to present them to his young friends, of whom Tom Bailey, you may be sure, was one.

How delightful it was of winter nights to sit in his cosey cabin, close to the ship’s stove (he wouldn’t hear of having a fireplace), and listen to Sailor Ben’s yarns!  In the early summer twilights, when he sat on the door-step splicing a rope or mending a net, he always had a bevy of blooming young faces alongside.

The dear old fellow!  How tenderly the years touched him after this—­all the more tenderly, it seemed, for having roughed him so cruelly in other days!

Chapter Seventeen—­How We Astonished the Rivermouthians

Sailor Ben’s arrival partly drove the New Orleans project from my brain.  Besides, there was just then a certain movement on foot by the Centipede Club which helped to engross my attention.

Pepper Whitcomb took the Captain’s veto philosophically, observing that he thought from the first the governor wouldn’t let me go.  I don’t think Pepper was quite honest in that.

But to the subject in hand.

Among the few changes that have taken place in Rivermouth during the past twenty years there is one which I regret.  I lament the removal of all those varnished iron cannon which used to do duty as posts at the corners of streets leading from the river.  They were quaintly ornamental, each set upon end with a solid shot soldered into its mouth, and gave to that part of the town a picturesqueness very poorly atoned for by the conventional wooden stakes that have deposed them.

These guns ("old sogers” the boys called them) had their story, like everything else in Rivermouth.  When that everlasting last war—­the War of 1812, I mean—­came to an end, all the brigs, schooners, and barks fitted out at this port as privateers were as eager to get rid of their useless twelve-pounders and swivels as they had previously been to obtain them.  Many of the pieces had cost large sums, and now they were little better than so much crude iron—­not so good, in fact, for they were clumsy things to break up and melt over.  The government didn’t want them; private citizens didn’t want them; they were a drug in the market.