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+Project Gutenberg's The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Country of the Pointed Firs
+
+Author: Sarah Orne Jewett
+
+Release Date: July 8, 2008 [EBook #367]
+Last Updated: March 15, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS
+
+By Sarah Orne Jewett
+
+
+Note:
+
+SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909) was born and died in South Berwick, Maine.
+Her father was the region's most distinguished doctor and, as a child,
+Jewett often accompanied him on his round of patient visits. She began
+writing poetry at an early age and when she was only 19 her short story
+“Mr. Bruce” was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Her association with
+that magazine continued, and William Dean Howells, who was editor at
+that time, encouraged her to publish her first book, Deephaven (1877),
+a collection of sketches published earlier in the Atlantic Monthly.
+Through her friendship with Howells, Jewett became acquainted with
+Boston's literary elite, including Annie Fields, with whom she developed
+one of the most intimate and lasting relationships of her life.
+
+The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett's finest
+work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of
+achievement.” Despite James's diminutives, the novel remains a classic.
+Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as
+a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified
+through both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths
+as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in
+character development. Indeed, she determined early in her career to
+preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a
+study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who
+lived in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast.
+
+Jewett died in 1909, eight years after an accident that effectively
+ended her writing career. Her reputation had grown during her lifetime,
+extending far beyond the bounds of the New England she loved.
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+              I  The Return
+             II  Mrs. Todd
+            III  The Schoolhouse
+             IV  At the Schoolhouse Window
+              V  Captain Littlepage
+             VI  The Waiting Place
+            VII  The Outer Island
+           VIII  Green Island
+             IX  William
+              X  Where Pennyroyal Grew
+             XI  The Old Singers
+            XII  A Strange Sail
+           XIII  Poor Joanna
+            XIV  The Hermitage
+             XV  On Shell-heap Island
+            XVI  The Great Expedition
+           XVII  A Country Road
+          XVIII  The Bowden Reunion
+            XIX  The Feast's End
+             XX  Along Shore
+            XXI  The Backward View
+
+
+
+
+
+I. The Return
+
+THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem
+more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps
+it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which
+made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and
+dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and
+tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made
+the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined
+floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows
+in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched
+the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along
+the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really
+knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming
+acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first
+sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true
+friendship may be a lifelong affair.
+
+After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course
+of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the
+unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village
+with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness,
+and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her
+affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger
+landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine
+crowd of spectators, and the younger portion of the company followed
+her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired,
+white-clapboarded little town.
+
+
+
+
+II. Mrs. Todd
+
+LATER, THERE WAS only one fault to find with this choice of a summer
+lodging-place, and that was its complete lack of seclusion. At first the
+tiny house of Mrs. Almira Todd, which stood with its end to the street,
+appeared to be retired and sheltered enough from the busy world, behind
+its bushy bit of a green garden, in which all the blooming things, two
+or three gay hollyhocks and some London-pride, were pushed back against
+the gray-shingled wall. It was a queer little garden and puzzling to
+a stranger, the few flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much
+greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent
+lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into
+the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier
+and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and
+southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner
+of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant
+presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full
+skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed.
+You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you
+were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a
+few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might
+be.
+
+At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic
+pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner herbs.
+There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and
+remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might
+once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult
+knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained
+only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar
+or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were
+dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by
+stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled. One
+nostrum was called the Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen
+cents; the whispered directions could be heard as customers passed
+the windows. With most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart
+unadmonished from the kitchen, Mrs. Todd being a wise saver of steps;
+but with certain vials she gave cautions, standing in the doorway, and
+there were other doses which had to be accompanied on their healing way
+as far as the gate, while she muttered long chapters of directions, and
+kept up an air of secrecy and importance to the last. It may not have
+been only the common aids of humanity with which she tried to cope; it
+seemed sometimes as if love and hate and jealousy and adverse winds at
+sea might also find their proper remedies among the curious wild-looking
+plants in Mrs. Todd's garden.
+
+The village doctor and this learned herbalist were upon the best of
+terms. The good man may have counted upon the unfavorable effect of
+certain potions which he should find his opportunity in counteracting;
+at any rate, he now and then stopped and exchanged greetings with Mrs.
+Todd over the picket fence. The conversation became at once professional
+after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a
+sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps
+about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in
+which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger
+the life and usefulness of worthy neighbors.
+
+To arrive at this quietest of seaside villages late in June, when the
+busy herb-gathering season was just beginning, was also to arrive in
+the early prime of Mrs. Todd's activity in the brewing of old-fashioned
+spruce beer. This cooling and refreshing drink had been brought to
+wonderful perfection through a long series of experiments; it had won
+immense local fame, and the supplies for its manufacture were always
+giving out and having to be replenished. For various reasons, the
+seclusion and uninterrupted days which had been looked forward to proved
+to be very rare in this otherwise delightful corner of the world. My
+hostess and I had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a
+simple cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of
+hot suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen
+hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand.
+It was soon found that this arrangement made large allowance for Mrs.
+Todd's slow herb-gathering progresses through woods and pastures. The
+spruce-beer customers were pretty steady in hot weather, and there were
+many demands for different soothing syrups and elixirs with which the
+unwise curiosity of my early residence had made me acquainted. Knowing
+Mrs. Todd to be a widow, who had little beside this slender business and
+the income from one hungry lodger to maintain her, one's energies and
+even interest were quickly bestowed, until it became a matter of course
+that she should go afield every pleasant day, and that the lodger should
+answer all peremptory knocks at the side door.
+
+In taking an occasional wisdom-giving stroll in Mrs. Todd's company, and
+in acting as business partner during her frequent absences, I found the
+July days fly fast, and it was not until I felt myself confronted with
+too great pride and pleasure in the display, one night, of two dollars
+and twenty-seven cents which I had taken in during the day, that I
+remembered a long piece of writing, sadly belated now, which I was bound
+to do. To have been patted kindly on the shoulder and called “darlin',”
+ to have been offered a surprise of early mushrooms for supper, to have
+had all the glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven cents in a
+single day, and then to renounce it all and withdraw from these pleasant
+successes, needed much resolution. Literary employments are so vexed
+with uncertainties at best, and it was not until the voice of conscience
+sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest pebble beach that
+I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd. She only became more
+wistfully affectionate than ever in her expressions, and looked as
+disappointed as I expected when I frankly told her that I could no
+longer enjoy the pleasure of what we called “seein' folks.” I felt that
+I was cruel to a whole neighborhood in curtailing her liberty in this
+most important season for harvesting the different wild herbs that were
+so much counted upon to ease their winter ails.
+
+“Well, dear,” she said sorrowfully, “I've took great advantage o' your
+bein' here. I ain't had such a season for years, but I have never had
+nobody I could so trust. All you lack is a few qualities, but with time
+you'd gain judgment an' experience, an' be very able in the business.
+I'd stand right here an' say it to anybody.”
+
+
+Mrs. Todd and I were not separated or estranged by the change in our
+business relations; on the contrary, a deeper intimacy seemed to begin.
+I do not know what herb of the night it was that used sometimes to send
+out a penetrating odor late in the evening, after the dew had fallen,
+and the moon was high, and the cool air came up from the sea. Then Mrs.
+Todd would feel that she must talk to somebody, and I was only too glad
+to listen. We both fell under the spell, and she either stood outside
+the window, or made an errand to my sitting-room, and told, it might
+be very commonplace news of the day, or, as happened one misty summer
+night, all that lay deepest in her heart. It was in this way that I came
+to know that she had loved one who was far above her.
+
+“No, dear, him I speak of could never think of me,” she said. “When
+we was young together his mother didn't favor the match, an' done
+everything she could to part us; and folks thought we both married well,
+but't wa'n't what either one of us wanted most; an' now we're left alone
+again, an' might have had each other all the time. He was above bein' a
+seafarin' man, an' prospered more than most; he come of a high family,
+an' my lot was plain an' hard-workin'. I ain't seen him for some years;
+he's forgot our youthful feelin's, I expect, but a woman's heart is
+different; them feelin's comes back when you think you've done with
+'em, as sure as spring comes with the year. An' I've always had ways of
+hearin' about him.”
+
+She stood in the centre of a braided rug, and its rings of black and
+gray seemed to circle about her feet in the dim light. Her height and
+massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a huge sibyl, while the
+strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew in from the little garden.
+
+
+
+
+III. The Schoolhouse
+
+FOR SOME DAYS after this, Mrs. Todd's customers came and went past my
+windows, and, haying-time being nearly over, strangers began to arrive
+from the inland country, such was her widespread reputation. Sometimes
+I saw a pale young creature like a white windflower left over into
+midsummer, upon whose face consumption had set its bright and wistful
+mark; but oftener two stout, hard-worked women from the farms came
+together, and detailed their symptoms to Mrs. Todd in loud and cheerful
+voices, combining the satisfactions of a friendly gossip with the
+medical opportunity. They seemed to give much from their own store of
+therapeutic learning. I became aware of the school in which my landlady
+had strengthened her natural gift; but hers was always the governing
+mind, and the final command, “Take of hy'sop one handful” (or whatever
+herb it was), was received in respectful silence. One afternoon, when
+I had listened,--it was impossible not to listen, with cottonless
+ears,--and then laughed and listened again, with an idle pen in my hand,
+during a particularly spirited and personal conversation, I reached for
+my hat, and, taking blotting-book and all under my arm, I resolutely
+fled further temptation, and walked out past the fragrant green garden
+and up the dusty road. The way went straight uphill, and presently I
+stopped and turned to look back.
+
+The tide was in, the wide harbor was surrounded by its dark woods, and
+the small wooden houses stood as near as they could get to the landing.
+Mrs. Todd's was the last house on the way inland. The gray ledges of the
+rocky shore were well covered with sod in most places, and the pasture
+bayberry and wild roses grew thick among them. I could see the higher
+inland country and the scattered farms. On the brink of the hill stood a
+little white schoolhouse, much wind-blown and weather-beaten, which was
+a landmark to seagoing folk; from its door there was a most beautiful
+view of sea and shore. The summer vacation now prevailed, and after
+finding the door unfastened, and taking a long look through one of the
+seaward windows, and reflecting afterward for some time in a shady place
+near by among the bayberry bushes, I returned to the chief place of
+business in the village, and, to the amusement of two of the selectmen,
+brothers and autocrats of Dunnet Landing, I hired the schoolhouse for
+the rest of the vacation for fifty cents a week.
+
+Selfish as it may appear, the retired situation seemed to possess great
+advantages, and I spent many days there quite undisturbed, with the
+sea-breeze blowing through the small, high windows and swaying the heavy
+outside shutters to and fro. I hung my hat and luncheon-basket on an
+entry nail as if I were a small scholar, but I sat at the teacher's desk
+as if I were that great authority, with all the timid empty benches in
+rows before me. Now and then an idle sheep came and stood for a long
+time looking in at the door. At sundown I went back, feeling most
+businesslike, down toward the village again, and usually met the flavor,
+not of the herb garden, but of Mrs. Todd's hot supper, halfway up the
+hill. On the nights when there were evening meetings or other public
+exercises that demanded her presence we had tea very early, and I was
+welcomed back as if from a long absence.
+
+Once or twice I feigned excuses for staying at home, while Mrs. Todd
+made distant excursions, and came home late, with both hands full and
+a heavily laden apron. This was in pennyroyal time, and when the rare
+lobelia was in its prime and the elecampane was coming on. One day she
+appeared at the schoolhouse itself, partly out of amused curiosity
+about my industries; but she explained that there was no tansy in
+the neighborhood with such snap to it as some that grew about the
+schoolhouse lot. Being scuffed down all the spring made it grow so much
+the better, like some folks that had it hard in their youth, and were
+bound to make the most of themselves before they died.
+
+
+
+
+IV. At the Schoolhouse Window
+
+ONE DAY I reached the schoolhouse very late, owing to attendance upon
+the funeral of an acquaintance and neighbor, with whose sad decline in
+health I had been familiar, and whose last days both the doctor and
+Mrs. Todd had tried in vain to ease. The services had taken place at
+one o'clock, and now, at quarter past two, I stood at the schoolhouse
+window, looking down at the procession as it went along the lower road
+close to the shore. It was a walking funeral, and even at that distance
+I could recognize most of the mourners as they went their solemn way.
+Mrs. Begg had been very much respected, and there was a large company
+of friends following to her grave. She had been brought up on one of
+the neighboring farms, and each of the few times that I had seen her
+she professed great dissatisfaction with town life. The people lived
+too close together for her liking, at the Landing, and she could not
+get used to the constant sound of the sea. She had lived to lament
+three seafaring husbands, and her house was decorated with West Indian
+curiosities, specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they had
+brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs. Todd had
+told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls together, and,
+to use her own phrase, had “both seen trouble till they knew the best
+and worst on 't.” I could see the sorrowful, large figure of Mrs. Todd
+as I stood at the window. She made a break in the procession by walking
+slowly and keeping the after-part of it back. She held a handkerchief
+to her eyes, and I knew, with a pang of sympathy, that hers was not
+affected grief.
+
+Beside her, after much difficulty, I recognized the one strange and
+unrelated person in all the company, an old man who had always been
+mysterious to me. I could see his thin, bending figure. He wore a
+narrow, long-tailed coat and walked with a stick, and had the same “cant
+to leeward” as the wind-bent trees on the height above.
+
+This was Captain Littlepage, whom I had seen only once or twice before,
+sitting pale and old behind a closed window; never out of doors until
+now. Mrs. Todd always shook her head gravely when I asked a question,
+and said that he wasn't what he had been once, and seemed to class him
+with her other secrets. He might have belonged with a simple which grew
+in a certain slug-haunted corner of the garden, whose use she could
+never be betrayed into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops
+by moonlight once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the
+great fading bloodroot leaves.
+
+I could see that she was trying to keep pace with the old captain's
+lighter steps. He looked like an aged grasshopper of some strange human
+variety. Behind this pair was a short, impatient, little person, who
+kept the captain's house, and gave it what Mrs. Todd and others believed
+to be no proper sort of care. She was usually called “that Mari' Harris”
+ in subdued conversation between intimates, but they treated her with
+anxious civility when they met her face to face.
+
+The bay-sheltered islands and the great sea beyond stretched away to
+the far horizon southward and eastward; the little procession in the
+foreground looked futile and helpless on the edge of the rocky shore. It
+was a glorious day early in July, with a clear, high sky; there were no
+clouds, there was no noise of the sea. The song sparrows sang and sang,
+as if with joyous knowledge of immortality, and contempt for those who
+could so pettily concern themselves with death. I stood watching until
+the funeral procession had crept round a shoulder of the slope below and
+disappeared from the great landscape as if it had gone into a cave.
+
+An hour later I was busy at my work. Now and then a bee blundered in and
+took me for an enemy; but there was a useful stick upon the teacher's
+desk, and I rapped to call the bees to order as if they were unruly
+scholars, or waved them away from their riots over the ink, which I had
+bought at the Landing store, and discovered to be scented with bergamot,
+as if to refresh the labors of anxious scribes. One anxious scribe
+felt very dull that day; a sheep-bell tinkled near by, and called her
+wandering wits after it. The sentences failed to catch these lovely
+summer cadences. For the first time I began to wish for a companion
+and for news from the outer world, which had been, half unconsciously,
+forgotten. Watching the funeral gave one a sort of pain. I began to
+wonder if I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying
+away at the end of the services. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on
+for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but I had
+now made myself and my friends remember that I did not really belong to
+Dunnet Landing.
+
+I sighed, and turned to the half-written page again.
+
+
+
+
+V. Captain Littlepage
+
+IT WAS A long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast
+town where nothing stole away the shortest minute. I had lost myself
+completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside. There was a steep
+footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I climbed to
+shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I believed that Mrs.
+Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had occasion to seek me in
+great haste. I wrote on, feeling like a besieged miser of time, while
+the footsteps came nearer, and the sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as
+if someone had shaken a stick in its wearer's face. Then I looked, and
+saw Captain Littlepage passing the nearest window; the next moment he
+tapped politely at the door.
+
+“Come in, sir,” I said, rising to meet him; and he entered, bowing with
+much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and offered him a chair by
+the window, where he seated himself at once, being sadly spent by his
+climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind the teacher's desk, which gave
+him the lower place of a scholar.
+
+“You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage,” I said.
+
+
+“A happy, rural seat of various views,”
+
+he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded
+shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased as a
+child.
+
+“My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems, I suppose
+you know?” and I nodded. “There's nothing that ranks, to my mind, with
+Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty,” he continued. “Shakespeare
+was a great poet; he copied life, but you have to put up with a great
+deal of low talk.”
+
+I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain
+Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she had also made
+dark reference to his having “spells” of some unexplainable nature. I
+could not help wondering what errand had brought him out in search of
+me. There was something quite charming in his appearance: it was a face
+thin and delicate with refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if
+he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his
+careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care
+on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari' Harris to be
+a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have no such standards;
+it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet. He sat
+looking at me expectantly. I could not help thinking that, with his
+queer head and length of thinness, he was made to hop along the road of
+life rather than to walk. The captain was very grave indeed, and I bade
+my inward spirit keep close to discretion.
+
+“Poor Mrs. Begg has gone,” I ventured to say. I still wore my Sunday
+gown by way of showing respect.
+
+“She has gone,” said the captain,--“very easy at the last, I was
+informed; she slipped away as if she were glad of the opportunity.”
+
+I thought of the Countess of Carberry, and felt that history repeated
+itself.
+
+“She was one of the old stock,” continued Captain Littlepage, with
+touching sincerity. “She was very much looked up to in this town, and
+will be missed.”
+
+I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line of
+ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command which are
+the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New England. But
+as Darwin says in his autobiography, “there is no such king as a
+sea-captain; he is greater even than a king or a schoolmaster!”
+
+Captain Littlepage moved his chair out of the wake of the sunshine,
+and still sat looking at me. I began to be very eager to know upon what
+errand he had come.
+
+“It may be found out some o' these days,” he said earnestly. “We may
+know it all, the next step; where Mrs. Begg is now, for instance.
+Certainty, not conjecture, is what we all desire.”
+
+“I suppose we shall know it all some day,” said I.
+
+“We shall know it while yet below,” insisted the captain, with a flush
+of impatience on his thin cheeks. “We have not looked for truth in the
+right direction. I know what I speak of; those who have laughed at me
+little know how much reason my ideas are based upon.” He waved his hand
+toward the village below. “In that handful of houses they fancy that
+they comprehend the universe.”
+
+I smiled, and waited for him to go on.
+
+“I am an old man, as you can see,” he continued, “and I have been a
+shipmaster the greater part of my life,--forty-three years in all. You
+may not think it, but I am above eighty years of age.”
+
+He did not look so old, and I hastened to say so.
+
+“You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then, Captain
+Littlepage?” I said.
+
+“I should have been serviceable at least five or six years more,” he
+answered. “My acquaintance with certain--my experience upon a certain
+occasion, I might say, gave rise to prejudice. I do not mind telling you
+that I chanced to learn of one of the greatest discoveries that man has
+ever made.”
+
+Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense of his
+sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and I asked to
+hear more with all the deference I really felt. A swallow flew into
+the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird were after it, and beat
+itself against the walls for a minute, and escaped again to the open
+air; but Captain Littlepage took no notice whatever of the flurry.
+
+“I had a valuable cargo of general merchandise from the London docks to
+Fort Churchill, a station of the old company on Hudson's Bay,” said the
+captain earnestly. “We were delayed in lading, and baffled by head winds
+and a heavy tumbling sea all the way north-about and across. Then the
+fog kept us off the coast; and when I made port at last, it was too late
+to delay in those northern waters with such a vessel and such a crew as
+I had. They cared for nothing, and idled me into a fit of sickness;
+but my first mate was a good, excellent man, with no more idea of being
+frozen in there until spring than I had, so we made what speed we could
+to get clear of Hudson's Bay and off the coast. I owned an eighth of
+the vessel, and he owned a sixteenth of her. She was a full-rigged ship,
+called the Minerva, but she was getting old and leaky. I meant it should
+be my last v'y'ge in her, and so it proved. She had been an excellent
+vessel in her day. Of the cowards aboard her I can't say so much.”
+
+“Then you were wrecked?” I asked, as he made a long pause.
+
+“I wa'n't caught astern o' the lighter by any fault of mine,” said the
+captain gloomily. “We left Fort Churchill and run out into the Bay with
+a light pair o' heels; but I had been vexed to death with their red-tape
+rigging at the company's office, and chilled with stayin' on deck an'
+tryin' to hurry up things, and when we were well out o' sight o' land,
+headin' for Hudson's Straits, I had a bad turn o' some sort o' fever,
+and had to stay below. The days were getting short, and we made good
+runs, all well on board but me, and the crew done their work by dint of
+hard driving.”
+
+I began to find this unexpected narrative a little dull. Captain
+Littlepage spoke with a kind of slow correctness that lacked the
+longshore high flavor to which I had grown used; but I listened
+respectfully while he explained the winds having become contrary, and
+talked on in a dreary sort of way about his voyage, the bad weather,
+and the disadvantages he was under in the lightness of his ship, which
+bounced about like a chip in a bucket, and would not answer the rudder
+or properly respond to the most careful setting of sails.
+
+“So there we were blowin' along anyways,” he complained; but looking at
+me at this moment, and seeing that my thoughts were unkindly wandering,
+he ceased to speak.
+
+“It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure,” said I, with
+redoubled interest.
+
+“It was a dog's life,” said the poor old gentleman, quite reassured,
+“but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse
+even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor as 'tis,
+who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of 'em. There is
+no occupation so fit for just that class o' men who never get beyond
+the fo'cas'le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and
+grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets
+no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled
+newspaper. In the old days, a good part o' the best men here knew a
+hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw
+the world for themselves, and like's not their wives and children saw it
+with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with 'em
+sight-seein', but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an' their
+laws, an' could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet;
+they got some sense o' proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and
+their houses were better within an' without. Shipping's a terrible loss
+to this part o' New England from a social point o' view, ma'am.”
+
+“I have thought of that myself,” I returned, with my interest quite
+awakened. “It accounts for the change in a great many things,--the sad
+disappearance of sea-captains,--doesn't it?”
+
+“A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading,” said my companion,
+brightening still more, and taking on a most touching air of unreserve.
+“A captain is not expected to be familiar with his crew, and for
+company's sake in dull days and nights he turns to his book. Most of us
+old shipmasters came to know 'most everything about something; one would
+take to readin' on farming topics, and some were great on medicine,--but
+Lord help their poor crews!--or some were all for history, and now and
+then there'd be one like me that gave his time to the poets. I was well
+acquainted with a shipmaster that was all for bees an' beekeepin'; and
+if you met him in port and went aboard, he'd sit and talk a terrible
+while about their havin' so much information, and the money that could
+be made out of keepin' 'em. He was one of the smartest captains that
+ever sailed the seas, but they used to call the Newcastle, a great
+bark he commanded for many years, Tuttle's beehive. There was old Cap'n
+Jameson: he had notions of Solomon's Temple, and made a very handsome
+little model of the same, right from the Scripture measurements, same's
+other sailors make little ships and design new tricks of rigging and all
+that. No, there's nothing to take the place of shipping in a place like
+ours. These bicycles offend me dreadfully; they don't afford no real
+opportunities of experience such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when
+folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when
+they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it. There's no
+large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule
+everything; we're all turned upside down and going back year by year.”
+
+“Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not,” said I, trying to soothe his
+feelings.
+
+There was a silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of
+the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave
+that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late golden robin, with the
+most joyful and eager of voices, was singing close by in a thicket of
+wild roses.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Waiting Place
+
+“HOW DID YOU manage with the rest of that rough voyage on the Minerva?”
+ I asked.
+
+“I shall be glad to explain to you,” said Captain Littlepage, forgetting
+his grievances for the moment. “If I had a map at hand I could explain
+better. We were driven to and fro 'way up toward what we used to call
+Parry's Discoveries, and lost our bearings. It was thick and foggy,
+and at last I lost my ship; she drove on a rock, and we managed to get
+ashore on what I took to be a barren island, the few of us that were
+left alive. When she first struck, the sea was somewhat calmer than it
+had been, and most of the crew, against orders, manned the long-boat and
+put off in a hurry, and were never heard of more. Our own boat upset,
+but the carpenter kept himself and me above water, and we drifted in.
+I had no strength to call upon after my recent fever, and laid down to
+die; but he found the tracks of a man and dog the second day, and
+got along the shore to one of those far missionary stations that the
+Moravians support. They were very poor themselves, and in distress;
+'twas a useless place. There were but few Esquimaux left in that region.
+There we remained for some time, and I became acquainted with strange
+events.”
+
+The captain lifted his head and gave me a questioning glance. I could
+not help noticing that the dulled look in his eyes had gone, and there
+was instead a clear intentness that made them seem dark and piercing.
+
+“There was a supply ship expected, and the pastor, an excellent
+Christian man, made no doubt that we should get passage in her. He was
+hoping that orders would come to break up the station; but everything
+was uncertain, and we got on the best we could for a while. We fished,
+and helped the people in other ways; there was no other way of paying
+our debts. I was taken to the pastor's house until I got better; but
+they were crowded, and I felt myself in the way, and made excuse to join
+with an old seaman, a Scotchman, who had built him a warm cabin, and had
+room in it for another. He was looked upon with regard, and had stood by
+the pastor in some troubles with the people. He had been on one of those
+English exploring parties that found one end of the road to the north
+pole, but never could find the other. We lived like dogs in a kennel, or
+so you'd thought if you had seen the hut from the outside; but the main
+thing was to keep warm; there were piles of bird-skins to lie on, and
+he'd made him a good bunk, and there was another for me. 'Twas dreadful
+dreary waitin' there; we begun to think the supply steamer was lost, and
+my poor ship broke up and strewed herself all along the shore. We got to
+watching on the headlands; my men and me knew the people were short of
+supplies and had to pinch themselves. It ought to read in the Bible,
+'Man cannot live by fish alone,' if they'd told the truth of things;
+'taint bread that wears the worst on you! First part of the time, old
+Gaffett, that I lived with, seemed speechless, and I didn't know what to
+make of him, nor he of me, I dare say; but as we got acquainted, I
+found he'd been through more disasters than I had, and had troubles that
+wa'n't going to let him live a great while. It used to ease his mind to
+talk to an understanding person, so we used to sit and talk together
+all day, if it rained or blew so that we couldn't get out. I'd got a bad
+blow on the back of my head at the time we came ashore, and it pained
+me at times, and my strength was broken, anyway; I've never been so able
+since.”
+
+Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.
+
+“Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had
+no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were
+foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets
+little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted
+with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if
+Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some
+beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until
+I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the
+stars above and those passages of verse.
+
+“Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to himself; he
+was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon his mind. He
+thought when I got home I could interest the scientific men in his
+discovery: but they're all taken up with their own notions; some didn't
+even take pains to answer the letters I wrote. You observe that I said
+this crippled man Gaffett had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I
+now tell you that the ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and
+two officers were saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge
+later that those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on
+was run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and
+he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country 'way up north
+beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett believed it was
+the next world to this.”
+
+“What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?” I exclaimed. The old man was
+bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder before he
+spoke the last sentence.
+
+“To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful,” he said, going
+on with his story quite steadily after the moment of excitement had
+passed. “'Twas first a tale of dogs and sledges, and cold and wind and
+snow. Then they begun to find the ice grow rotten; they had been frozen
+in, and got into a current flowing north, far up beyond Fox Channel,
+and they took to their boats when the ship got crushed, and this warm
+current took them out of sight of the ice, and into a great open sea;
+and they still followed it due north, just the very way they had planned
+to go. Then they struck a coast that wasn't laid down or charted, but
+the cliffs were such that no boat could land until they found a bay and
+struck across under sail to the other side where the shore looked lower;
+they were scant of provisions and out of water, but they got sight of
+something that looked like a great town. 'For God's sake, Gaffett!' said
+I, the first time he told me. 'You don't mean a town two degrees farther
+north than ships had ever been?' for he'd got their course marked on an
+old chart that he'd pieced out at the top; but he insisted upon it, and
+told it over and over again, to be sure I had it straight to carry to
+those who would be interested. There was no snow and ice, he said, after
+they had sailed some days with that warm current, which seemed to come
+right from under the ice that they'd been pinched up in and had been
+crossing on foot for weeks.”
+
+“But what about the town?” I asked. “Did they get to the town?”
+
+“They did,” said the captain, “and found inhabitants; 'twas an awful
+condition of things. It appeared, as near as Gaffett could express it,
+like a place where there was neither living nor dead. They could see the
+place when they were approaching it by sea pretty near like any town,
+and thick with habitations; but all at once they lost sight of it
+altogether, and when they got close inshore they could see the shapes
+of folks, but they never could get near them,--all blowing gray figures
+that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if
+they were watching. The men were frightened at first, but the shapes
+never came near them,--it was as if they blew back; and at last they all
+got bold and went ashore, and found birds' eggs and sea fowl, like any
+wild northern spot where creatures were tame and folks had never been,
+and there was good water. Gaffett said that he and another man came near
+one o' the fog-shaped men that was going along slow with the look of a
+pack on his back, among the rocks, an' they chased him; but, Lord! he
+flittered away out o' sight like a leaf the wind takes with it, or a
+piece of cobweb. They would make as if they talked together, but there
+was no sound of voices, and 'they acted as if they didn't see us, but
+only felt us coming towards them,' says Gaffett one day, trying to tell
+the particulars. They couldn't see the town when they were ashore. One
+day the captain and the doctor were gone till night up across the high
+land where the town had seemed to be, and they came back at night
+beat out and white as ashes, and wrote and wrote all next day in their
+notebooks, and whispered together full of excitement, and they were
+sharp-spoken with the men when they offered to ask any questions.
+
+“Then there came a day,” said Captain Littlepage, leaning toward me with
+a strange look in his eyes, and whispering quickly. “The men all swore
+they wouldn't stay any longer; the man on watch early in the morning
+gave the alarm, and they all put off in the boat and got a little way
+out to sea. Those folks, or whatever they were, come about 'em like
+bats; all at once they raised incessant armies, and come as if to drive
+'em back to sea. They stood thick at the edge o' the water like the
+ridges o' grim war; no thought o' flight, none of retreat. Sometimes
+a standing fight, then soaring on main wing tormented all the air.
+And when they'd got the boat out o' reach o' danger, Gaffett said they
+looked back, and there was the town again, standing up just as they'd
+seen it first, comin' on the coast. Say what you might, they all
+believed 'twas a kind of waiting-place between this world an' the next.”
+
+The captain had sprung to his feet in his excitement, and made excited
+gestures, but he still whispered huskily.
+
+“Sit down, sir,” I said as quietly as I could, and he sank into his
+chair quite spent.
+
+“Gaffett thought the officers were hurrying home to report and to fit
+out a new expedition when they were all lost. At the time, the men
+got orders not to talk over what they had seen,” the old man explained
+presently in a more natural tone.
+
+“Weren't they all starving, and wasn't it a mirage or something of that
+sort?” I ventured to ask. But he looked at me blankly.
+
+“Gaffett had got so that his mind ran on nothing else,” he went on. “The
+ship's surgeon let fall an opinion to the captain, one day, that 'twas
+some condition o' the light and the magnetic currents that let them see
+those folks. 'Twa'n't a right-feeling part of the world, anyway; they
+had to battle with the compass to make it serve, an' everything seemed
+to go wrong. Gaffett had worked it out in his own mind that they was
+all common ghosts, but the conditions were unusual favorable for seeing
+them. He was always talking about the Ge'graphical Society, but he never
+took proper steps, as I viewed it now, and stayed right there at the
+mission. He was a good deal crippled, and thought they'd confine him in
+some jail of a hospital. He said he was waiting to find the right men to
+tell, somebody bound north. Once in a while they stopped there to leave
+a mail or something. He was set in his notions, and let two or three
+proper explorin' expeditions go by him because he didn't like their
+looks; but when I was there he had got restless, fearin' he might be
+taken away or something. He had all his directions written out straight
+as a string to give the right ones. I wanted him to trust 'em to me,
+so I might have something to show, but he wouldn't. I suppose he's dead
+now. I wrote to him an' I done all I could. 'Twill be a great exploit
+some o' these days.”
+
+I assented absent-mindedly, thinking more just then of my companion's
+alert, determined look and the seafaring, ready aspect that had come to
+his face; but at this moment there fell a sudden change, and the
+old, pathetic, scholarly look returned. Behind me hung a map of North
+America, and I saw, as I turned a little, that his eyes were fixed upon
+the northernmost regions and their careful recent outlines with a look
+of bewilderment.
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Outer Island
+
+
+GAFFETT WITH HIS good bunk and the bird-skins, the story of the wreck
+of the Minerva, the human-shaped creatures of fog and cobweb, the great
+words of Milton with which he described their onslaught upon the crew,
+all this moving tale had such an air of truth that I could not argue
+with Captain Littlepage. The old man looked away from the map as if it
+had vaguely troubled him, and regarded me appealingly.
+
+“We were just speaking of”--and he stopped. I saw that he had suddenly
+forgotten his subject.
+
+“There were a great many persons at the funeral,” I hastened to say.
+
+“Oh yes,” the captain answered, with satisfaction. “All showed respect
+who could. The sad circumstances had for a moment slipped my mind. Yes,
+Mrs. Begg will be very much missed. She was a capital manager for her
+husband when he was at sea. Oh yes, shipping is a very great loss.” And
+he sighed heavily. “There was hardly a man of any standing who didn't
+interest himself in some way in navigation. It always gave credit to a
+town. I call it low-water mark now here in Dunnet.”
+
+He rose with dignity to take leave, and asked me to stop at his house
+some day, when he would show me some outlandish things that he had
+brought home from sea. I was familiar with the subject of the decadence
+of shipping interests in all its affecting branches, having been already
+some time in Dunnet, and I felt sure that Captain Littlepage's mind had
+now returned to a safe level.
+
+As we came down the hill toward the village our ways divided, and when
+I had seen the old captain well started on a smooth piece of sidewalk
+which would lead him to his own door, we parted, the best of friends.
+“Step in some afternoon,” he said, as affectionately as if I were a
+fellow-shipmaster wrecked on the lee shore of age like himself. I
+turned toward home, and presently met Mrs. Todd coming toward me with an
+anxious expression.
+
+“I see you sleevin' the old gentleman down the hill,” she suggested.
+
+“Yes. I've had a very interesting afternoon with him,” I answered, and
+her face brightened.
+
+“Oh, then he's all right. I was afraid 'twas one o' his flighty spells,
+an' Mari' Harris wouldn't”--
+
+“Yes,” I returned, smiling, “he has been telling me some old stories,
+but we talked about Mrs. Begg and the funeral beside, and Paradise
+Lost.”
+
+“I expect he got tellin' of you some o' his great narratives,” she
+answered, looking at me shrewdly. “Funerals always sets him goin'. Some
+o' them tales hangs together toler'ble well,” she added, with a sharper
+look than before. “An' he's been a great reader all his seafarin' days.
+Some thinks he overdid, and affected his head, but for a man o' his
+years he's amazin' now when he's at his best. Oh, he used to be a
+beautiful man!”
+
+
+We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long
+stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs,
+darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked
+far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward
+still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.
+
+It had been growing gray and cloudy, like the first evening of autumn,
+and a shadow had fallen on the darkening shore. Suddenly, as we looked,
+a gleam of golden sunshine struck the outer islands, and one of them
+shone out clear in the light, and revealed itself in a compelling way to
+our eyes. Mrs. Todd was looking off across the bay with a face full of
+affection and interest. The sunburst upon that outermost island made
+it seem like a sudden revelation of the world beyond this which some
+believe to be so near.
+
+“That's where mother lives,” said Mrs. Todd. “Can't we see it plain? I
+was brought up out there on Green Island. I know every rock an' bush on
+it.”
+
+“Your mother!” I exclaimed, with great interest.
+
+“Yes, dear, cert'in; I've got her yet, old's I be. She's one of them
+spry, light-footed little women; always was, an' light-hearted, too,”
+ answered Mrs. Todd, with satisfaction. “She's seen all the trouble folks
+can see, without it's her last sickness; an' she's got a word of courage
+for everybody. Life ain't spoilt her a mite. She's eighty-six an' I'm
+sixty-seven, and I've seen the time I've felt a good sight the oldest.
+'Land sakes alive!' says she, last time I was out to see her. 'How you
+do lurch about steppin' into a bo't?' I laughed so I liked to have gone
+right over into the water; an' we pushed off, an' left her laughin'
+there on the shore.”
+
+The light had faded as we watched. Mrs. Todd had mounted a gray rock,
+and stood there grand and architectural, like a caryatide. Presently she
+stepped down, and we continued our way homeward.
+
+“You an' me, we'll take a bo't an' go out some day and see mother,”
+ she promised me. “'Twould please her very much, an' there's one or two
+sca'ce herbs grows better on the island than anywhere else. I ain't seen
+their like nowheres here on the main.”
+
+“Now I'm goin' right down to get us each a mug o' my beer,” she
+announced as we entered the house, “an' I believe I'll sneak in a little
+mite o' camomile. Goin' to the funeral an' all, I feel to have had a
+very wearin' afternoon.”
+
+I heard her going down into the cool little cellar, and then there was
+considerable delay. When she returned, mug in hand, I noticed the taste
+of camomile, in spite of my protest; but its flavor was disguised by
+some other herb that I did not know, and she stood over me until I drank
+it all and said that I liked it.
+
+“I don't give that to everybody,” said Mrs. Todd kindly; and I felt for
+a moment as if it were part of a spell and incantation, and as if my
+enchantress would now begin to look like the cobweb shapes of the arctic
+town. Nothing happened but a quiet evening and some delightful plans
+that we made about going to Green Island, and on the morrow there was
+the clear sunshine and blue sky of another day.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. Green Island
+
+ONE MORNING, very early, I heard Mrs. Todd in the garden outside my
+window. By the unusual loudness of her remarks to a passer-by, and the
+notes of a familiar hymn which she sang as she worked among the herbs,
+and which came as if directed purposely to the sleepy ears of my
+consciousness, I knew that she wished I would wake up and come and speak
+to her.
+
+In a few minutes she responded to a morning voice from behind the
+blinds. “I expect you're goin' up to your schoolhouse to pass all this
+pleasant day; yes, I expect you're goin' to be dreadful busy,” she said
+despairingly.
+
+“Perhaps not,” said I. “Why, what's going to be the matter with you,
+Mrs. Todd?” For I supposed that she was tempted by the fine weather to
+take one of her favorite expeditions along the shore pastures to gather
+herbs and simples, and would like to have me keep the house.
+
+“No, I don't want to go nowhere by land,” she answered gayly,--“no, not
+by land; but I don't know's we shall have a better day all the rest of
+the summer to go out to Green Island an' see mother. I waked up early
+thinkin' of her. The wind's light northeast,--'twill take us right
+straight out, an' this time o' year it's liable to change round
+southwest an' fetch us home pretty, 'long late in the afternoon. Yes,
+it's goin' to be a good day.”
+
+“Speak to the captain and the Bowden boy, if you see anybody going by
+toward the landing,” said I. “We'll take the big boat.”
+
+“Oh, my sakes! now you let me do things my way,” said Mrs. Todd
+scornfully. “No, dear, we won't take no big bo't. I'll just git a handy
+dory, an' Johnny Bowden an' me, we'll man her ourselves. I don't want no
+abler bo't than a good dory, an' a nice light breeze ain't goin' to make
+no sea; an' Johnny's my cousin's son,--mother'll like to have him come;
+an' he'll be down to the herrin' weirs all the time we're there, anyway;
+we don't want to carry no men folks havin' to be considered every minute
+an' takin' up all our time. No, you let me do; we'll just slip out an'
+see mother by ourselves. I guess what breakfast you'll want's about
+ready now.”
+
+I had become well acquainted with Mrs. Todd as landlady, herb-gatherer,
+and rustic philosopher; we had been discreet fellow-passengers once
+or twice when I had sailed up the coast to a larger town than Dunnet
+Landing to do some shopping; but I was yet to become acquainted with
+her as a mariner. An hour later we pushed off from the landing in the
+desired dory. The tide was just on the turn, beginning to fall,
+and several friends and acquaintances stood along the side of the
+dilapidated wharf and cheered us by their words and evident interest.
+Johnny Bowden and I were both rowing in haste to get out where we could
+catch the breeze and put up the small sail which lay clumsily furled
+along the gunwale. Mrs. Todd sat aft, a stern and unbending lawgiver.
+
+“You better let her drift; we'll get there 'bout as quick; the tide'll
+take her right out from under these old buildin's; there's plenty wind
+outside.”
+
+“Your bo't ain't trimmed proper, Mis' Todd!” exclaimed a voice from
+shore. “You're lo'ded so the bo't'll drag; you can't git her before
+the wind, ma'am. You set 'midships, Mis' Todd, an' let the boy hold the
+sheet 'n' steer after he gits the sail up; you won't never git out to
+Green Island that way. She's lo'ded bad, your bo't is,--she's heavy
+behind's she is now!”
+
+Mrs. Todd turned with some difficulty and regarded the anxious adviser,
+my right oar flew out of water, and we seemed about to capsize. “That
+you, Asa? Good-mornin',” she said politely. “I al'ays liked the starn
+seat best. When'd you git back from up country?”
+
+This allusion to Asa's origin was not lost upon the rest of the company.
+We were some little distance from shore, but we could hear a chuckle
+of laughter, and Asa, a person who was too ready with his criticism and
+advice on every possible subject, turned and walked indignantly away.
+
+When we caught the wind we were soon on our seaward course, and only
+stopped to underrun a trawl, for the floats of which Mrs. Todd looked
+earnestly, explaining that her mother might not be prepared for three
+extra to dinner; it was her brother's trawl, and she meant to just run
+her eye along for the right sort of a little haddock. I leaned over the
+boat's side with great interest and excitement, while she skillfully
+handled the long line of hooks, and made scornful remarks upon
+worthless, bait-consuming creatures of the sea as she reviewed them and
+left them on the trawl or shook them off into the waves. At last we came
+to what she pronounced a proper haddock, and having taken him on board
+and ended his life resolutely, we went our way.
+
+As we sailed along I listened to an increasingly delightful commentary
+upon the islands, some of them barren rocks, or at best giving sparse
+pasturage for sheep in the early summer. On one of these an eager little
+flock ran to the water's edge and bleated at us so affectingly that I
+would willingly have stopped; but Mrs. Todd steered away from the rocks,
+and scolded at the sheep's mean owner, an acquaintance of hers, who
+grudged the little salt and still less care which the patient creatures
+needed. The hot midsummer sun makes prisons of these small islands
+that are a paradise in early June, with their cool springs and short
+thick-growing grass. On a larger island, farther out to sea, my
+entertaining companion showed me with glee the small houses of two
+farmers who shared the island between them, and declared that for three
+generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of
+sickness or death or birth. “When the news come that the war was over,
+one of 'em knew it a week, and never stepped across his wall to tell the
+other,” she said. “There, they enjoy it; they've got to have somethin'
+to interest 'em in such a place; 'tis a good deal more tryin' to be
+tied to folks you don't like than 'tis to be alone. Each of 'em tell
+the neighbors their wrongs; plenty likes to hear and tell again; them
+as fetch a bone'll carry one, an' so they keep the fight a-goin'. I must
+say I like variety myself; some folks washes Monday an' irons Tuesday
+the whole year round, even if the circus is goin' by!”
+
+A long time before we landed at Green Island we could see the small
+white house, standing high like a beacon, where Mrs. Todd was born and
+where her mother lived, on a green slope above the water, with dark
+spruce woods still higher. There were crops in the fields, which we
+presently distinguished from one another. Mrs. Todd examined them while
+we were still far at sea. “Mother's late potatoes looks backward; ain't
+had rain enough so far,” she pronounced her opinion. “They look weedier
+than what they call Front Street down to Cowper Centre. I expect brother
+William is so occupied with his herrin' weirs an' servin' out bait to
+the schooners that he don't think once a day of the land.”
+
+“What's the flag for, up above the spruces there behind the house?” I
+inquired, with eagerness.
+
+“Oh, that's the sign for herrin',” she explained kindly, while Johnny
+Bowden regarded me with contemptuous surprise. “When they get enough for
+schooners they raise that flag; an' when 'tis a poor catch in the weir
+pocket they just fly a little signal down by the shore, an' then the
+small bo'ts comes and get enough an' over for their trawls. There, look!
+there she is: mother sees us; she's wavin' somethin' out o' the fore
+door! She'll be to the landin'-place quick's we are.”
+
+I looked, and could see a tiny flutter in the doorway, but a quicker
+signal had made its way from the heart on shore to the heart on the sea.
+
+“How do you suppose she knows it is me?” said Mrs. Todd, with a tender
+smile on her broad face. “There, you never get over bein' a child long's
+you have a mother to go to. Look at the chimney, now; she's gone right
+in an' brightened up the fire. Well, there, I'm glad mother's well;
+you'll enjoy seein' her very much.”
+
+Mrs. Todd leaned back into her proper position, and the boat trimmed
+again. She took a firmer grasp of the sheet, and gave an impatient look
+up at the gaff and the leech of the little sail, and twitched the sheet
+as if she urged the wind like a horse. There came at once a fresh gust,
+and we seemed to have doubled our speed. Soon we were near enough to see
+a tiny figure with handkerchiefed head come down across the field and
+stand waiting for us at the cove above a curve of pebble beach.
+
+Presently the dory grated on the pebbles, and Johnny Bowden, who had
+been kept in abeyance during the voyage, sprang out and used manful
+exertions to haul us up with the next wave, so that Mrs. Todd could make
+a dry landing.
+
+“You don that very well,” she said, mounting to her feet, and
+coming ashore somewhat stiffly, but with great dignity, refusing our
+outstretched hands, and returning to possess herself of a bag which had
+lain at her feet.
+
+“Well, mother, here I be!” she announced with indifference; but they
+stood and beamed in each other's faces.
+
+“Lookin' pretty well for an old lady, ain't she?” said Mrs. Todd's
+mother, turning away from her daughter to speak to me. She was a
+delightful little person herself, with bright eyes and an affectionate
+air of expectation like a child on a holiday. You felt as if Mrs.
+Blackett were an old and dear friend before you let go her cordial hand.
+We all started together up the hill.
+
+“Now don't you haste too fast, mother,” said Mrs. Todd warningly; “'tis
+a far reach o' risin' ground to the fore door, and you won't set an' get
+your breath when you're once there, but go trotting about. Now don't
+you go a mite faster than we proceed with this bag an' basket. Johnny,
+there, 'll fetch up the haddock. I just made one stop to underrun
+William's trawl till I come to jes' such a fish's I thought you'd want
+to make one o' your nice chowders of. I've brought an onion with me that
+was layin' about on the window-sill at home.”
+
+“That's just what I was wantin',” said the hostess. “I give a sigh
+when you spoke o' chowder, knowin' my onions was out. William forgot
+to replenish us last time he was to the Landin'. Don't you haste so
+yourself Almiry, up this risin' ground. I hear you commencin' to wheeze
+a'ready.”
+
+This mild revenge seemed to afford great pleasure to both giver
+and receiver. They laughed a little, and looked at each other
+affectionately, and then at me. Mrs. Todd considerately paused, and
+faced about to regard the wide sea view. I was glad to stop, being more
+out of breath than either of my companions, and I prolonged the halt
+by asking the names of the neighboring islands. There was a fine breeze
+blowing, which we felt more there on the high land than when we were
+running before it in the dory.
+
+“Why, this ain't that kitten I saw when I was out last, the one that I
+said didn't appear likely?” exclaimed Mrs. Todd as we went our way.
+
+“That's the one, Almiry,” said her mother. “She always had a likely look
+to me, an' she's right after business. I never see such a mouser for
+one of her age. If't wan't for William, I never should have housed that
+other dronin' old thing so long; but he sets by her on account of her
+havin' a bob tail. I don't deem it advisable to maintain cats just on
+account of their havin' bob tails; they're like all other curiosities,
+good for them that wants to see 'm twice. This kitten catches mice for
+both, an' keeps me respectable as I ain't been for a year. She's a real
+understandin' little help, this kitten is. I picked her from among five
+Miss Augusta Pernell had over to Burnt Island,” said the old woman,
+trudging along with the kitten close at her skirts. “Augusta, she says
+to me, 'Why, Mis' Blackett, you've took and homeliest;' and, says I,
+'I've got the smartest; I'm satisfied.'”
+
+“I'd trust nobody sooner'n you to pick out a kitten, mother,” said the
+daughter handsomely, and we went on in peace and harmony.
+
+The house was just before us now, on a green level that looked as if
+a huge hand had scooped it out of the long green field we had been
+ascending. A little way above, the dark, spruce woods began to climb the
+top of the hill and cover the seaward slopes of the island. There was
+just room for the small farm and the forest; we looked down at the
+fish-house and its rough sheds, and the weirs stretching far out into
+the water. As we looked upward, the tops of the firs came sharp against
+the blue sky. There was a great stretch of rough pasture-land round
+the shoulder of the island to the eastward, and here were all the
+thick-scattered gray rocks that kept their places, and the gray backs
+of many sheep that forever wandered and fed on the thin sweet pasturage
+that fringed the ledges and made soft hollows and strips of green turf
+like growing velvet. I could see the rich green of bayberry bushes here
+and there, where the rocks made room. The air was very sweet; one could
+not help wishing to be a citizen of such a complete and tiny continent
+and home of fisherfolk.
+
+The house was broad and clean, with a roof that looked heavy on its low
+walls. It was one of the houses that seem firm-rooted in the ground, as
+if they were two-thirds below the surface, like icebergs. The front door
+stood hospitably open in expectation of company, and an orderly
+vine grew at each side; but our path led to the kitchen door at the
+house-end, and there grew a mass of gay flowers and greenery, as if they
+had been swept together by some diligent garden broom into a tangled
+heap: there were portulacas all along under the lower step and
+straggling off into the grass, and clustering mallows that crept as near
+as they dared, like poor relations. I saw the bright eyes and brainless
+little heads of two half-grown chickens who were snuggled down among the
+mallows as if they had been chased away from the door more than once,
+and expected to be again.
+
+“It seems kind o' formal comin' in this way,” said Mrs. Todd
+impulsively, as we passed the flowers and came to the front doorstep;
+but she was mindful of the proprieties, and walked before us into the
+best room on the left.
+
+“Why, mother, if you haven't gone an' turned the carpet!” she exclaimed,
+with something in her voice that spoke of awe and admiration. “When'd
+you get to it? I s'pose Mis' Addicks come over an' helped you, from
+White Island Landing?”
+
+“No, she didn't,” answered the old woman, standing proudly erect, and
+making the most of a great moment. “I done it all myself with William's
+help. He had a spare day, an' took right holt with me; an' 'twas all
+well beat on the grass, an' turned, an' put down again afore we went to
+bed. I ripped an' sewed over two o' them long breadths. I ain't had such
+a good night's sleep for two years.”
+
+“There, what do you think o' havin' such a mother as that for eighty-six
+year old?” said Mrs. Todd, standing before us like a large figure of
+Victory.
+
+As for the mother, she took on a sudden look of youth; you felt as if
+she promised a great future, and was beginning, not ending, her summers
+and their happy toils.
+
+“My, my!” exclaimed Mrs. Todd. “I couldn't ha' done it myself, I've got
+to own it.”
+
+“I was much pleased to have it off my mind,” said Mrs. Blackett, humbly;
+“the more so because along at the first of the next week I wasn't very
+well. I suppose it may have been the change of weather.”
+
+Mrs. Todd could not resist a significant glance at me, but, with
+charming sympathy, she forbore to point the lesson or to connect this
+illness with its apparent cause. She loomed larger than ever in the
+little old-fashioned best room, with its few pieces of good furniture
+and pictures of national interest. The green paper curtains were
+stamped with conventional landscapes of a foreign order,--castles
+on inaccessible crags, and lovely lakes with steep wooded shores;
+under-foot the treasured carpet was covered thick with home-made rugs.
+There were empty glass lamps and crystallized bouquets of grass and some
+fine shells on the narrow mantelpiece.
+
+“I was married in this room,” said Mrs. Todd unexpectedly; and I heard
+her give a sigh after she had spoken, as if she could not help the touch
+of regret that would forever come with all her thoughts of happiness.
+
+“We stood right there between the windows,” she added, “and the minister
+stood here. William wouldn't come in. He was always odd about seein'
+folks, just's he is now. I run to meet 'em from a child, an' William,
+he'd take an' run away.”
+
+“I've been the gainer,” said the old mother cheerfully. “William has
+been son an' daughter both since you was married off the island. He's
+been 'most too satisfied to stop at home 'long o' his old mother, but I
+always tell 'em I'm the gainer.”
+
+We were all moving toward the kitchen as if by common instinct. The best
+room was too suggestive of serious occasions, and the shades were
+all pulled down to shut out the summer light and air. It was indeed a
+tribute to Society to find a room set apart for her behests out there
+on so apparently neighborless and remote an island. Afternoon visits
+and evening festivals must be few in such a bleak situation at certain
+seasons of the year, but Mrs. Blackett was of those who do not live to
+themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere
+self-concern from a valued share in whatever Society can give and take.
+There were those of her neighbors who never had taken the trouble to
+furnish a best room, but Mrs. Blackett was one who knew the uses of a
+parlor.
+
+“Yes, do come right out into the old kitchen; I shan't make any stranger
+of you,” she invited us pleasantly, after we had been properly received
+in the room appointed to formality. “I expect Almiry, here, 'll be
+driftin' out 'mongst the pasture-weeds quick's she can find a good
+excuse. 'Tis hot now. You'd better content yourselves till you get nice
+an' rested, an' 'long after dinner the sea-breeze 'll spring up, an'
+then you can take your walks, an' go up an' see the prospect from the
+big ledge. Almiry'll want to show off everything there is. Then I'll get
+you a good cup o' tea before you start to go home. The days are plenty
+long now.”
+
+While we were talking in the best room the selected fish had been
+mysteriously brought up from the shore, and lay all cleaned and ready in
+an earthen crock on the table.
+
+“I think William might have just stopped an' said a word,” remarked
+Mrs. Todd, pouting with high affront as she caught sight of it. “He's
+friendly enough when he comes ashore, an' was remarkable social the last
+time, for him.”
+
+“He ain't disposed to be very social with the ladies,” explained
+William's mother, with a delightful glance at me, as if she counted upon
+my friendship and tolerance. “He's very particular, and he's all in his
+old fishin'-clothes to-day. He'll want me to tell him everything you
+said and done, after you've gone. William has very deep affections.
+He'll want to see you, Almiry. Yes, I guess he'll be in by an' by.”
+
+“I'll search for him by 'n' by, if he don't,” proclaimed Mrs. Todd, with
+an air of unalterable resolution. “I know all of his burrows down 'long
+the shore. I'll catch him by hand 'fore he knows it. I've got some
+business with William, anyway. I brought forty-two cents with me that
+was due him for them last lobsters he brought in.”
+
+“You can leave it with me,” suggested the little old mother, who was
+already stepping about among her pots and pans in the pantry, and
+preparing to make the chowder.
+
+I became possessed of a sudden unwonted curiosity in regard to William,
+and felt that half the pleasure of my visit would be lost if I could not
+make his interesting acquaintance.
+
+
+
+
+IX. William
+
+MRS. TODD HAD taken the onion out of her basket and laid it down upon
+the kitchen table. “There's Johnny Bowden come with us, you know,” she
+reminded her mother. “He'll be hungry enough to eat his size.”
+
+“I've got new doughnuts, dear,” said the little old lady. “You don't
+often catch William 'n' me out o' provisions. I expect you might have
+chose a somewhat larger fish, but I'll try an' make it do. I shall have
+to have a few extra potatoes, but there's a field full out there,
+an' the hoe's leanin' against the well-house, in 'mongst the
+climbin'-beans.” She smiled and gave her daughter a commanding nod.
+
+“Land sakes alive! Le's blow the horn for William,” insisted Mrs. Todd,
+with some excitement. “He needn't break his spirit so far's to come in.
+He'll know you need him for something particular, an' then we can call
+to him as he comes up the path. I won't put him to no pain.”
+
+Mrs. Blackett's old face, for the first time, wore a look of trouble,
+and I found it necessary to counteract the teasing spirit of Almira.
+It was too pleasant to stay indoors altogether, even in such rewarding
+companionship; besides, I might meet William; and, straying out
+presently, I found the hoe by the well-house and an old splint basket at
+the woodshed door, and also found my way down to the field where there
+was a great square patch of rough, weedy potato-tops and tall ragweed.
+One corner was already dug, and I chose a fat-looking hill where the
+tops were well withered. There is all the pleasure that one can have in
+gold-digging in finding one's hopes satisfied in the riches of a good
+hill of potatoes. I longed to go on; but it did not seem frugal to dig
+any longer after my basket was full, and at last I took my hoe by the
+middle and lifted the basket to go back up the hill. I was sure that
+Mrs. Blackett must be waiting impatiently to slice the potatoes into the
+chowder, layer after layer, with the fish.
+
+“You let me take holt o' that basket, ma'am,” said the pleasant, anxious
+voice behind me.
+
+I turned, startled in the silence of the wide field, and saw an elderly
+man, bent in the shoulders as fishermen often are, gray-headed and
+clean-shaven, and with a timid air. It was William. He looked just like
+his mother, and I had been imagining that he was large and stout like
+his sister, Almira Todd; and, strange to say, my fancy had led me to
+picture him not far from thirty and a little loutish. It was necessary
+instead to pay William the respect due to age.
+
+I accustomed myself to plain facts on the instant, and we said
+good-morning like old friends. The basket was really heavy, and I put
+the hoe through its handle and offered him one end; then we moved easily
+toward the house together, speaking of the fine weather and of mackerel
+which were reported to be striking in all about the bay. William had
+been out since three o'clock, and had taken an extra fare of fish.
+I could feel that Mrs. Todd's eyes were upon us as we approached the
+house, and although I fell behind in the narrow path, and let William
+take the basket alone and precede me at some little distance the rest of
+the way, I could plainly hear her greet him.
+
+“Got round to comin' in, didn't you?” she inquired, with amusement.
+“Well, now, that's clever. Didn't know's I should see you to-day,
+William, an' I wanted to settle an account.”
+
+I felt somewhat disturbed and responsible, but when I joined them they
+were on most simple and friendly terms. It became evident that, with
+William, it was the first step that cost, and that, having once joined
+in social interests, he was able to pursue them with more or less
+pleasure. He was about sixty, and not young-looking for his years, yet
+so undying is the spirit of youth, and bashfulness has such a power
+of survival, that I felt all the time as if one must try to make the
+occasion easy for some one who was young and new to the affairs of
+social life. He asked politely if I would like to go up to the great
+ledge while dinner was getting ready; so, not without a deep sense of
+pleasure, and a delighted look of surprise from the two hostesses,
+we started, William and I, as if both of us felt much younger than we
+looked. Such was the innocence and simplicity of the moment that when
+I heard Mrs. Todd laughing behind us in the kitchen I laughed too, but
+William did not even blush. I think he was a little deaf, and he stepped
+along before me most businesslike and intent upon his errand.
+
+We went from the upper edge of the field above the house into a smooth,
+brown path among the dark spruces. The hot sun brought out the fragrance
+of the pitchy bark, and the shade was pleasant as we climbed the hill.
+William stopped once or twice to show me a great wasps'-nest close by,
+or some fishhawks'-nests below in a bit of swamp. He picked a few sprigs
+of late-blooming linnaea as we came out upon an open bit of pasture at
+the top of the island, and gave them to me without speaking, but he
+knew as well as I that one could not say half he wished about linnaea.
+Through this piece of rough pasture ran a huge shape of stone like the
+great backbone of an enormous creature. At the end, near the woods, we
+could climb up on it and walk along to the highest point; there above
+the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and
+could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island
+ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden
+sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,--that
+sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.
+
+“There ain't no such view in the world, I expect,” said William
+proudly, and I hastened to speak my heartfelt tribute of praise; it was
+impossible not to feel as if an untraveled boy had spoken, and yet one
+loved to have him value his native heath.
+
+
+
+
+X. Where Pennyroyal Grew
+
+WE WERE a little late to dinner, but Mrs. Blackett and Mrs. Todd were
+lenient, and we all took our places after William had paused to wash his
+hands, like a pious Brahmin, at the well, and put on a neat blue coat
+which he took from a peg behind the kitchen door. Then he resolutely
+asked a blessing in words that I could not hear, and we ate the chowder
+and were thankful. The kitten went round and round the table, quite
+erect, and, holding on by her fierce young claws, she stopped to mew
+with pathos at each elbow, or darted off to the open door when a song
+sparrow forgot himself and lit in the grass too near. William did not
+talk much, but his sister Todd occupied the time and told all the news
+there was to tell of Dunnet Landing and its coasts, while the old mother
+listened with delight. Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had
+the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves
+and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure,--that charming
+surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them,
+so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.
+Tact is after all a kind of mindreading, and my hostess held the golden
+gift. Sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart, and Mrs. Blackett's
+world and mine were one from the moment we met. Besides, she had that
+final, that highest gift of heaven, a perfect self-forgetfulness.
+Sometimes, as I watched her eager, sweet old face, I wondered why she
+had been set to shine on this lonely island of the northern coast.
+It must have been to keep the balance true, and make up to all her
+scattered and depending neighbors for other things which they may have
+lacked.
+
+When we had finished clearing away the old blue plates, and the kitten
+had taken care of her share of the fresh haddock, just as we were
+putting back the kitchen chairs in their places, Mrs. Todd said briskly
+that she must go up into the pasture now to gather the desired herbs.
+
+“You can stop here an' rest, or you can accompany me,” she announced.
+“Mother ought to have her nap, and when we come back she an' William'll
+sing for you. She admires music,” said Mrs. Todd, turning to speak to
+her mother.
+
+But Mrs. Blackett tried to say that she couldn't sing as she used, and
+perhaps William wouldn't feel like it. She looked tired, the good old
+soul, or I should have liked to sit in the peaceful little house while
+she slept; I had had much pleasant experience of pastures already in her
+daughter's company. But it seemed best to go with Mrs. Todd, and off we
+went.
+
+Mrs. Todd carried the gingham bag which she had brought from home, and a
+small heavy burden in the bottom made it hang straight and slender from
+her hand. The way was steep, and she soon grew breathless, so that we
+sat down to rest awhile on a convenient large stone among the bayberry.
+
+“There, I wanted you to see this,--'tis mother's picture,” said Mrs.
+Todd; “'twas taken once when she was up to Portland soon after she
+was married. That's me,” she added, opening another worn case, and
+displaying the full face of the cheerful child she looked like still in
+spite of being past sixty. “And here's William an' father together. I
+take after father, large and heavy, an' William is like mother's folks,
+short an' thin. He ought to have made something o' himself, bein' a man
+an' so like mother; but though he's been very steady to work, an' kept
+up the farm, an' done his fishin' too right along, he never had mother's
+snap an' power o' seein' things just as they be. He's got excellent
+judgment, too,” meditated William's sister, but she could not arrive at
+any satisfactory decision upon what she evidently thought his failure in
+life. “I think it is well to see any one so happy an' makin' the most
+of life just as it falls to hand,” she said as she began to put the
+daguerreotypes away again; but I reached out my hand to see her mother's
+once more, a most flowerlike face of a lovely young woman in quaint
+dress. There was in the eyes a look of anticipation and joy, a far-off
+look that sought the horizon; one often sees it in seafaring families,
+inherited by girls and boys alike from men who spend their lives at sea,
+and are always watching for distant sails or the first loom of the
+land. At sea there is nothing to be seen close by, and this has its
+counterpart in a sailor's character, in the large and brave and patient
+traits that are developed, the hopeful pleasantness that one loves so in
+a seafarer.
+
+When the family pictures were wrapped again in a big handkerchief, we
+set forward in a narrow footpath and made our way to a lonely place that
+faced northward, where there was more pasturage and fewer bushes, and we
+went down to the edge of short grass above some rocky cliffs where the
+deep sea broke with a great noise, though the wind was down and the
+water looked quiet a little way from shore. Among the grass grew such
+pennyroyal as the rest of the world could not provide. There was a fine
+fragrance in the air as we gathered it sprig by sprig and stepped along
+carefully, and Mrs. Todd pressed her aromatic nosegay between her hands
+and offered it to me again and again.
+
+“There's nothin' like it,” she said; “oh no, there's no such pennyr'yal
+as this in the state of Maine. It's the right pattern of the plant, and
+all the rest I ever see is but an imitation. Don't it do you good?” And
+I answered with enthusiasm.
+
+“There, dear, I never showed nobody else but mother where to find this
+place; 'tis kind of sainted to me. Nathan, my husband, an' I used to
+love this place when we was courtin', and”--she hesitated, and then
+spoke softly--“when he was lost, 'twas just off shore tryin' to get in
+by the short channel out there between Squaw Islands, right in sight o'
+this headland where we'd set an' made our plans all summer long.”
+
+I had never heard her speak of her husband before, but I felt that we
+were friends now since she had brought me to this place.
+
+“'Twas but a dream with us,” Mrs. Todd said. “I knew it when he was
+gone. I knew it”--and she whispered as if she were at confession--“I
+knew it afore he started to go to sea. My heart was gone out o' my
+keepin' before I ever saw Nathan; but he loved me well, and he made me
+real happy, and he died before he ever knew what he'd had to know if
+we'd lived long together. 'Tis very strange about love. No, Nathan never
+found out, but my heart was troubled when I knew him first. There's more
+women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves. I spent some
+happy hours right here. I always liked Nathan, and he never knew. But
+this pennyr'yal always reminded me, as I'd sit and gather it and hear
+him talkin'--it always would remind me of--the other one.”
+
+She looked away from me, and presently rose and went on by herself.
+There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined
+shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. It is not
+often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and
+silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she
+seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the
+remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the
+scents of primeval herbs.
+
+
+I was not incompetent at herb-gathering, and after a while, when I had
+sat long enough waking myself to new thoughts, and reading a page of
+remembrance with new pleasure, I gathered some bunches, as I was bound
+to do, and at last we met again higher up the shore, in the plain
+every-day world we had left behind when we went down to the penny-royal
+plot. As we walked together along the high edge of the field we saw a
+hundred sails about the bay and farther seaward; it was mid-afternoon or
+after, and the day was coming to an end.
+
+“Yes, they're all makin' towards the shore,--the small craft an' the
+lobster smacks an' all,” said my companion. “We must spend a little time
+with mother now, just to have our tea, an' then put for home.”
+
+“No matter if we lose the wind at sundown; I can row in with Johnny,”
+ said I; and Mrs. Todd nodded reassuringly and kept to her steady plod,
+not quickening her gait even when we saw William come round the corner
+of the house as if to look for us, and wave his hand and disappear.
+
+“Why, William's right on deck; I didn't know's we should see any more of
+him!” exclaimed Mrs. Todd. “Now mother'll put the kettle right on; she's
+got a good fire goin'.” I too could see the blue smoke thicken, and then
+we both walked a little faster, while Mrs. Todd groped in her full bag
+of herbs to find the daguerreotypes and be ready to put them in their
+places.
+
+
+
+
+XI. The Old Singers
+
+WILLIAM WAS sitting on the side door step, and the old mother was busy
+making her tea; she gave into my hand an old flowered-glass tea-caddy.
+
+“William thought you'd like to see this, when he was settin' the table.
+My father brought it to my mother from the island of Tobago; an' here's
+a pair of beautiful mugs that came with it.” She opened the glass door
+of a little cupboard beside the chimney. “These I call my best things,
+dear,” she said. “You'd laugh to see how we enjoy 'em Sunday nights in
+winter: we have a real company tea 'stead o' livin' right along just
+the same, an' I make somethin' good for a s'prise an' put on some o' my
+preserves, an' we get a'talkin' together an' have real pleasant times.”
+
+Mrs. Todd laughed indulgently, and looked to see what I thought of such
+childishness.
+
+“I wish I could be here some Sunday evening,” said I.
+
+“William an' me'll be talkin' about you an' thinkin' o' this nice day,”
+ said Mrs. Blackett affectionately, and she glanced at William, and he
+looked up bravely and nodded. I began to discover that he and his sister
+could not speak their deeper feelings before each other.
+
+“Now I want you an' mother to sing,” said Mrs. Todd abruptly, with
+an air of command, and I gave William much sympathy in his evident
+distress.
+
+“After I've had my cup o' tea, dear,” answered the old hostess
+cheerfully; and so we sat down and took our cups and made merry while
+they lasted. It was impossible not to wish to stay on forever at Green
+Island, and I could not help saying so.
+
+“I'm very happy here, both winter an' summer,” said old Mrs. Blackett.
+“William an' I never wish for any other home, do we, William? I'm glad
+you find it pleasant; I wish you'd come an' stay, dear, whenever you
+feel inclined. But here's Almiry; I always think Providence was kind
+to plot an' have her husband leave her a good house where she really
+belonged. She'd been very restless if she'd had to continue here on
+Green Island. You wanted more scope, didn't you, Almiry, an' to live in
+a large place where more things grew? Sometimes folks wonders that
+we don't live together; perhaps we shall some time,” and a shadow of
+sadness and apprehension flitted across her face. “The time o' sickness
+an' failin' has got to come to all. But Almiry's got an herb that's good
+for everything.” She smiled as she spoke, and looked bright again.
+
+“There's some herb that's good for everybody, except for them that
+thinks they're sick when they ain't,” announced Mrs. Todd, with a truly
+professional air of finality. “Come, William, let's have Sweet Home, an'
+then mother'll sing Cupid an' the Bee for us.”
+
+Then followed a most charming surprise. William mastered his timidity
+and began to sing. His voice was a little faint and frail, like the
+family daguerreotypes, but it was a tenor voice, and perfectly true
+and sweet. I have never heard Home, Sweet Home sung as touchingly and
+seriously as he sang it; he seemed to make it quite new; and when he
+paused for a moment at the end of the first line and began the next,
+the old mother joined him and they sang together, she missing only the
+higher notes, where he seemed to lend his voice to hers for the moment
+and carry on her very note and air. It was the silent man's real and
+only means of expression, and one could have listened forever, and have
+asked for more and more songs of old Scotch and English inheritance and
+the best that have lived from the ballad music of the war. Mrs. Todd
+kept time visibly, and sometimes audibly, with her ample foot. I saw the
+tears in her eyes sometimes, when I could see beyond the tears in mine.
+But at last the songs ended and the time came to say good-by; it was the
+end of a great pleasure.
+
+Mrs. Blackett, the dear old lady, opened the door of her bedroom while
+Mrs. Todd was tying up the herb bag, and William had gone down to get
+the boat ready and to blow the horn for Johnny Bowden, who had joined a
+roving boat party who were off the shore lobstering.
+
+I went to the door of the bedroom, and thought how pleasant it looked,
+with its pink-and-white patchwork quilt and the brown unpainted paneling
+of its woodwork.
+
+“Come right in, dear,” she said. “I want you to set down in my old
+quilted rockin'-chair there by the window; you'll say it's the prettiest
+view in the house. I set there a good deal to rest me and when I want to
+read.”
+
+There was a worn red Bible on the lightstand, and Mrs. Blackett's heavy
+silver-bowed glasses; her thimble was on the narrow window-ledge, and
+folded carefully on the table was a thick striped-cotton shirt that
+she was making for her son. Those dear old fingers and their loving
+stitches, that heart which had made the most of everything that needed
+love! Here was the real home, the heart of the old house on Green
+Island! I sat in the rocking-chair, and felt that it was a place of
+peace, the little brown bedroom, and the quiet outlook upon field and
+sea and sky.
+
+I looked up, and we understood each other without speaking. “I shall
+like to think o' your settin' here to-day,” said Mrs. Blackett. “I want
+you to come again. It has been so pleasant for William.”
+
+The wind served us all the way home, and did not fall or let the sail
+slacken until we were close to the shore. We had a generous freight of
+lobsters in the boat, and new potatoes which William had put aboard, and
+what Mrs. Todd proudly called a full “kag” of prime number one salted
+mackerel; and when we landed we had to make business arrangements to
+have these conveyed to her house in a wheelbarrow.
+
+I never shall forget the day at Green Island. The town of Dunnet Landing
+seemed large and noisy and oppressive as we came ashore. Such is the
+power of contrast; for the village was so still that I could hear the
+shy whippoorwills singing that night as I lay awake in my downstairs
+bedroom, and the scent of Mrs. Todd's herb garden under the window blew
+in again and again with every gentle rising of the seabreeze.
+
+
+
+
+XII. A Strange Sail
+
+EXCEPT FOR a few stray guests, islanders or from the inland country, to
+whom Mrs. Todd offered the hospitalities of a single meal, we were quite
+by ourselves all summer; and when there were signs of invasion, late in
+July, and a certain Mrs. Fosdick appeared like a strange sail on the
+far horizon, I suffered much from apprehension. I had been living in the
+quaint little house with as much comfort and unconsciousness as if it
+were a larger body, or a double shell, in whose simple convolutions Mrs.
+Todd and I had secreted ourselves, until some wandering hermit crab of a
+visitor marked the little spare room for her own. Perhaps now and then a
+castaway on a lonely desert island dreads the thought of being rescued.
+I heard of Mrs. Fosdick for the first time with a selfish sense
+of objection; but after all, I was still vacation-tenant of the
+schoolhouse, where I could always be alone, and it was impossible not to
+sympathize with Mrs. Todd, who, in spite of some preliminary grumbling,
+was really delighted with the prospect of entertaining an old friend.
+
+For nearly a month we received occasional news of Mrs. Fosdick, who
+seemed to be making a royal progress from house to house in the inland
+neighborhood, after the fashion of Queen Elizabeth. One Sunday after
+another came and went, disappointing Mrs. Todd in the hope of seeing
+her guest at church and fixing the day for the great visit to begin; but
+Mrs. Fosdick was not ready to commit herself to a date. An assurance of
+“some time this week” was not sufficiently definite from a free-footed
+housekeeper's point of view, and Mrs. Todd put aside all herb-gathering
+plans, and went through the various stages of expectation, provocation,
+and despair. At last she was ready to believe that Mrs. Fosdick must
+have forgotten her promise and returned to her home, which was vaguely
+said to be over Thomaston way. But one evening, just as the supper-table
+was cleared and “readied up,” and Mrs. Todd had put her large apron
+over her head and stepped forth for an evening stroll in the garden, the
+unexpected happened. She heard the sound of wheels, and gave an excited
+cry to me, as I sat by the window, that Mrs. Fosdick was coming right up
+the street.
+
+“She may not be considerate, but she's dreadful good company,” said Mrs.
+Todd hastily, coming back a few steps from the neighborhood of the gate.
+“No, she ain't a mite considerate, but there's a small lobster left over
+from your tea; yes, it's a real mercy there's a lobster. Susan Fosdick
+might just as well have passed the compliment o' comin' an hour ago.”
+
+“Perhaps she has had her supper,” I ventured to suggest, sharing the
+housekeeper's anxiety, and meekly conscious of an inconsiderate appetite
+for my own supper after a long expedition up the bay. There were so
+few emergencies of any sort at Dunnet Landing that this one appeared
+overwhelming.
+
+“No, she's rode 'way over from Nahum Brayton's place. I expect they were
+busy on the farm, and couldn't spare the horse in proper season. You
+just sly out an' set the teakittle on again, dear, an' drop in a good
+han'ful o' chips; the fire's all alive. I'll take her right up to lay
+off her things, as she'll be occupied with explanations an' gettin' her
+bunnit off, so you'll have plenty o' time. She's one I shouldn't like to
+have find me unprepared.”
+
+Mrs. Fosdick was already at the gate, and Mrs. Todd now turned with an
+air of complete surprise and delight to welcome her.
+
+“Why, Susan Fosdick,” I heard her exclaim in a fine unhindered voice, as
+if she were calling across a field, “I come near giving of you up! I was
+afraid you'd gone an' 'portioned out my visit to somebody else. I s'pose
+you've been to supper?”
+
+“Lor', no, I ain't, Almiry Todd,” said Mrs. Fosdick cheerfully, as she
+turned, laden with bags and bundles, from making her adieux to the boy
+driver. “I ain't had a mite o' supper, dear. I've been lottin' all the
+way on a cup o' that best tea o' yourn,--some o' that Oolong you keep in
+the little chist. I don't want none o' your useful herbs.”
+
+“I keep that tea for ministers' folks,” gayly responded Mrs. Todd.
+“Come right along in, Susan Fosdick. I declare if you ain't the same old
+sixpence!”
+
+As they came up the walk together, laughing like girls, I fled, full
+of cares, to the kitchen, to brighten the fire and be sure that the
+lobster, sole dependence of a late supper, was well out of reach of the
+cat. There proved to be fine reserves of wild raspberries and bread and
+butter, so that I regained my composure, and waited impatiently for my
+own share of this illustrious visit to begin. There was an instant sense
+of high festivity in the evening air from the moment when our guest had
+so frankly demanded the Oolong tea.
+
+The great moment arrived. I was formally presented at the stair-foot,
+and the two friends passed on to the kitchen, where I soon heard a
+hospitable clink of crockery and the brisk stirring of a tea-cup. I sat
+in my high-backed rocking-chair by the window in the front room with an
+unreasonable feeling of being left out, like the child who stood at
+the gate in Hans Andersen's story. Mrs. Fosdick did not look, at first
+sight, like a person of great social gifts. She was a serious-looking
+little bit of an old woman, with a birdlike nod of the head. I had often
+been told that she was the “best hand in the world to make a visit,”--as
+if to visit were the highest of vocations; that everybody wished
+for her, while few could get her; and I saw that Mrs. Todd felt a
+comfortable sense of distinction in being favored with the company of
+this eminent person who “knew just how.” It was certainly true that Mrs.
+Fosdick gave both her hostess and me a warm feeling of enjoyment
+and expectation, as if she had the power of social suggestion to all
+neighboring minds.
+
+The two friends did not reappear for at least an hour. I could hear
+their busy voices, loud and low by turns, as they ranged from public
+to confidential topics. At last Mrs. Todd kindly remembered me and
+returned, giving my door a ceremonious knock before she stepped in,
+with the small visitor in her wake. She reached behind her and took Mrs.
+Fosdick's hand as if she were young and bashful, and gave her a gentle
+pull forward.
+
+“There, I don't know whether you're goin' to take to each other or
+not; no, nobody can't tell whether you'll suit each other, but I
+expect you'll get along some way, both having seen the world,” said
+our affectionate hostess. “You can inform Mis' Fosdick how we found
+the folks out to Green Island the other day. She's always been well
+acquainted with mother. I'll slip out now an' put away the supper things
+an' set my bread to rise, if you'll both excuse me. You can come an'
+keep me company when you get ready, either or both.” And Mrs. Todd,
+large and amiable, disappeared and left us.
+
+Being furnished not only with a subject of conversation, but with a safe
+refuge in the kitchen in case of incompatibility, Mrs. Fosdick and I sat
+down, prepared to make the best of each other. I soon discovered that
+she, like many of the elder women of the coast, had spent a part of
+her life at sea, and was full of a good traveler's curiosity and
+enlightenment. By the time we thought it discreet to join our hostess we
+were already sincere friends.
+
+You may speak of a visit's setting in as well as a tide's, and it was
+impossible, as Mrs. Todd whispered to me, not to be pleased at the way
+this visit was setting in; a new impulse and refreshing of the social
+currents and seldom visited bays of memory appeared to have begun.
+Mrs. Fosdick had been the mother of a large family of sons and
+daughters,--sailors and sailors' wives,--and most of them had died
+before her. I soon grew more or less acquainted with the histories of
+all their fortunes and misfortunes, and subjects of an intimate nature
+were no more withheld from my ears than if I had been a shell on
+the mantelpiece. Mrs. Fosdick was not without a touch of dignity and
+elegance; she was fashionable in her dress, but it was a curiously
+well-preserved provincial fashion of some years back. In a wider sphere
+one might have called her a woman of the world, with her unexpected bits
+of modern knowledge, but Mrs. Todd's wisdom was an intimation of truth
+itself. She might belong to any age, like an idyl of Theocritus; but
+while she always understood Mrs. Fosdick, that entertaining pilgrim
+could not always understand Mrs. Todd.
+
+That very first evening my friends plunged into a borderless sea of
+reminiscences and personal news. Mrs. Fosdick had been staying with a
+family who owned the farm where she was born, and she had visited every
+sunny knoll and shady field corner; but when she said that it might be
+for the last time, I detected in her tone something expectant of the
+contradiction which Mrs. Todd promptly offered.
+
+“Almiry,” said Mrs. Fosdick, with sadness, “you may say what you like,
+but I am one of nine brothers and sisters brought up on the old place,
+and we're all dead but me.”
+
+“Your sister Dailey ain't gone, is she? Why, no, Louisa ain't gone!”
+ exclaimed Mrs. Todd, with surprise. “Why, I never heard of that
+occurrence!”
+
+“Yes'm; she passed away last October, in Lynn. She had made her distant
+home in Vermont State, but she was making a visit to her youngest
+daughter. Louisa was the only one of my family whose funeral I wasn't
+able to attend, but 'twas a mere accident. All the rest of us were
+settled right about home. I thought it was very slack of 'em in Lynn
+not to fetch her to the old place; but when I came to hear about it,
+I learned that they'd recently put up a very elegant monument, and my
+sister Dailey was always great for show. She'd just been out to see the
+monument the week before she was taken down, and admired it so much that
+they felt sure of her wishes.”
+
+“So she's really gone, and the funeral was up to Lynn!” repeated Mrs.
+Todd, as if to impress the sad fact upon her mind. “She was some years
+younger than we be, too. I recollect the first day she ever came to
+school; 'twas that first year mother sent me inshore to stay with aunt
+Topham's folks and get my schooling. You fetched little Louisa to school
+one Monday mornin' in a pink dress an' her long curls, and she set
+between you an' me, and got cryin' after a while, so the teacher sent us
+home with her at recess.”
+
+“She was scared of seeing so many children about her; there was only her
+and me and brother John at home then; the older boys were to sea with
+father, an' the rest of us wa'n't born,” explained Mrs. Fosdick. “That
+next fall we all went to sea together. Mother was uncertain till the
+last minute, as one may say. The ship was waiting orders, but the baby
+that then was, was born just in time, and there was a long spell of
+extra bad weather, so mother got about again before they had to sail,
+an' we all went. I remember my clothes were all left ashore in the east
+chamber in a basket where mother'd took them out o' my chist o' drawers
+an' left 'em ready to carry aboard. She didn't have nothing aboard, of
+her own, that she wanted to cut up for me, so when my dress wore out she
+just put me into a spare suit o' John's, jacket and trousers. I wasn't
+but eight years old an' he was most seven and large of his age. Quick
+as we made a port she went right ashore an' fitted me out pretty, but
+we was bound for the East Indies and didn't put in anywhere for a good
+while. So I had quite a spell o' freedom. Mother made my new skirt
+long because I was growing, and I poked about the deck after that, real
+discouraged, feeling the hem at my heels every minute, and as if youth
+was past and gone. I liked the trousers best; I used to climb the
+riggin' with 'em and frighten mother till she said an' vowed she'd never
+take me to sea again.”
+
+I thought by the polite absent-minded smile on Mrs. Todd's face this was
+no new story.
+
+“Little Louisa was a beautiful child; yes, I always thought Louisa was
+very pretty,” Mrs. Todd said. “She was a dear little girl in those
+days. She favored your mother; the rest of you took after your father's
+folks.”
+
+“We did certain,” agreed Mrs. Fosdick, rocking steadily. “There, it does
+seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you
+know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have
+neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the
+past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears
+a person out.”
+
+Mrs. Todd gave a funny little laugh. “Yes'm, old friends is always best,
+'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of,”
+ she said, and we gave an affectionate glance at each other which Mrs.
+Fosdick could not have understood, being the latest comer to the house.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. Poor Joanna
+
+ONE EVENING my ears caught a mysterious allusion which Mrs. Todd made to
+Shell-heap Island. It was a chilly night of cold northeasterly rain, and
+I made a fire for the first time in the Franklin stove in my room, and
+begged my two housemates to come in and keep me company. The weather had
+convinced Mrs. Todd that it was time to make a supply of cough-drops,
+and she had been bringing forth herbs from dark and dry hiding-places,
+until now the pungent dust and odor of them had resolved themselves into
+one mighty flavor of spearmint that came from a simmering caldron
+of syrup in the kitchen. She called it done, and well done, and had
+ostentatiously left it to cool, and taken her knitting-work because
+Mrs. Fosdick was busy with hers. They sat in the two rocking-chairs, the
+small woman and the large one, but now and then I could see that Mrs.
+Todd's thoughts remained with the cough-drops. The time of gathering
+herbs was nearly over, but the time of syrups and cordials had begun.
+
+The heat of the open fire made us a little drowsy, but something in the
+way Mrs. Todd spoke of Shell-heap Island waked my interest. I waited to
+see if she would say any more, and then took a roundabout way back to
+the subject by saying what was first in my mind: that I wished the Green
+Island family were there to spend the evening with us,--Mrs. Todd's
+mother and her brother William.
+
+Mrs. Todd smiled, and drummed on the arm of the rocking-chair. “Might
+scare William to death,” she warned me; and Mrs. Fosdick mentioned her
+intention of going out to Green Island to stay two or three days, if the
+wind didn't make too much sea.
+
+“Where is Shell-heap Island?” I ventured to ask, seizing the
+opportunity.
+
+“Bears nor-east somewheres about three miles from Green Island; right
+off-shore, I should call it about eight miles out,” said Mrs. Todd. “You
+never was there, dear; 'tis off the thoroughfares, and a very bad place
+to land at best.”
+
+“I should think 'twas,” agreed Mrs. Fosdick, smoothing down her black
+silk apron. “'Tis a place worth visitin' when you once get there. Some
+o' the old folks was kind o' fearful about it. 'Twas 'counted a great
+place in old Indian times; you can pick up their stone tools 'most any
+time if you hunt about. There's a beautiful spring o' water, too. Yes,
+I remember when they used to tell queer stories about Shell-heap Island.
+Some said 'twas a great bangeing-place for the Indians, and an old chief
+resided there once that ruled the winds; and others said they'd always
+heard that once the Indians come down from up country an' left a captive
+there without any bo't, an' 'twas too far to swim across to Black
+Island, so called, an' he lived there till he perished.”
+
+“I've heard say he walked the island after that, and sharp-sighted folks
+could see him an' lose him like one o' them citizens Cap'n Littlepage
+was acquainted with up to the north pole,” announced Mrs. Todd grimly.
+“Anyway, there was Indians--you can see their shell-heap that named the
+island; and I've heard myself that 'twas one o' their cannibal places,
+but I never could believe it. There never was no cannibals on the coast
+o' Maine. All the Indians o' these regions are tame-looking folks.”
+
+“Sakes alive, yes!” exclaimed Mrs. Fosdick. “Ought to see them painted
+savages I've seen when I was young out in the South Sea Islands! That
+was the time for folks to travel, 'way back in the old whalin' days!”
+
+“Whalin' must have been dull for a lady, hardly ever makin' a lively
+port, and not takin' in any mixed cargoes,” said Mrs. Todd. “I never
+desired to go a whalin' v'y'ge myself.”
+
+“I used to return feelin' very slack an' behind the times, 'tis true,”
+ explained Mrs. Fosdick, “but 'twas excitin', an' we always done extra
+well, and felt rich when we did get ashore. I liked the variety. There,
+how times have changed; how few seafarin' families there are left! What
+a lot o' queer folks there used to be about here, anyway, when we was
+young, Almiry. Everybody's just like everybody else, now; nobody to
+laugh about, and nobody to cry about.”
+
+It seemed to me that there were peculiarities of character in the region
+of Dunnet Landing yet, but I did not like to interrupt.
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Todd after a moment of meditation, “there was certain
+a good many curiosities of human natur' in this neighborhood years ago.
+There was more energy then, and in some the energy took a singular turn.
+In these days the young folks is all copy-cats, 'fraid to death they
+won't be all just alike; as for the old folks, they pray for the
+advantage o' bein' a little different.”
+
+“I ain't heard of a copy-cat this great many years,” said Mrs. Fosdick,
+laughing; “'twas a favorite term o' my grandfather's. No, I wa'n't
+thinking o' those things, but of them strange straying creatur's that
+used to rove the country. You don't see them now, or the ones that used
+to hive away in their own houses with some strange notion or other.”
+
+I thought again of Captain Littlepage, but my companions were not
+reminded of his name; and there was brother William at Green Island,
+whom we all three knew.
+
+“I was talking o' poor Joanna the other day. I hadn't thought of her for
+a great while,” said Mrs. Fosdick abruptly. “Mis' Brayton an' I recalled
+her as we sat together sewing. She was one o' your peculiar persons,
+wa'n't she? Speaking of such persons,” she turned to explain to me,
+“there was a sort of a nun or hermit person lived out there for years
+all alone on Shell-heap Island. Miss Joanna Todd, her name was,--a
+cousin o' Almiry's late husband.”
+
+I expressed my interest, but as I glanced at Mrs. Todd I saw that she
+was confused by sudden affectionate feeling and unmistakable desire for
+reticence.
+
+“I never want to hear Joanna laughed about,” she said anxiously.
+
+“Nor I,” answered Mrs. Fosdick reassuringly. “She was crossed in
+love,--that was all the matter to begin with; but as I look back, I can
+see that Joanna was one doomed from the first to fall into a melancholy.
+She retired from the world for good an' all, though she was a well-off
+woman. All she wanted was to get away from folks; she thought she wasn't
+fit to live with anybody, and wanted to be free. Shell-heap Island come
+to her from her father, and first thing folks knew she'd gone off out
+there to live, and left word she didn't want no company. 'Twas a bad
+place to get to, unless the wind an' tide were just right; 'twas hard
+work to make a landing.”
+
+“What time of year was this?” I asked.
+
+“Very late in the summer,” said Mrs. Fosdick. “No, I never could laugh
+at Joanna, as some did. She set everything by the young man, an' they
+were going to marry in about a month, when he got bewitched with a girl
+'way up the bay, and married her, and went off to Massachusetts. He
+wasn't well thought of,--there were those who thought Joanna's money
+was what had tempted him; but she'd given him her whole heart, an' she
+wa'n't so young as she had been. All her hopes were built on marryin',
+an' havin' a real home and somebody to look to; she acted just like a
+bird when its nest is spoilt. The day after she heard the news she was
+in dreadful woe, but the next she came to herself very quiet, and took
+the horse and wagon, and drove fourteen miles to the lawyer's, and
+signed a paper givin' her half of the farm to her brother. They never
+had got along very well together, but he didn't want to sign it, till
+she acted so distressed that he gave in. Edward Todd's wife was a good
+woman, who felt very bad indeed, and used every argument with Joanna;
+but Joanna took a poor old boat that had been her father's and lo'ded in
+a few things, and off she put all alone, with a good land breeze, right
+out to sea. Edward Todd ran down to the beach, an' stood there cryin'
+like a boy to see her go, but she was out o' hearin'. She never stepped
+foot on the mainland again long as she lived.”
+
+“How large an island is it? How did she manage in winter?” I asked.
+
+“Perhaps thirty acres, rocks and all,” answered Mrs. Todd, taking up the
+story gravely. “There can't be much of it that the salt spray don't fly
+over in storms. No, 'tis a dreadful small place to make a world of;
+it has a different look from any of the other islands, but there's a
+sheltered cove on the south side, with mud-flats across one end of it
+at low water where there's excellent clams, and the big shell-heap keeps
+some o' the wind off a little house her father took the trouble to build
+when he was a young man. They said there was an old house built o' logs
+there before that, with a kind of natural cellar in the rock under it.
+He used to stay out there days to a time, and anchor a little sloop he
+had, and dig clams to fill it, and sail up to Portland. They said the
+dealers always gave him an extra price, the clams were so noted. Joanna
+used to go out and stay with him. They were always great companions, so
+she knew just what 'twas out there. There was a few sheep that belonged
+to her brother an' her, but she bargained for him to come and get them
+on the edge o' cold weather. Yes, she desired him to come for the sheep;
+an' his wife thought perhaps Joanna'd return, but he said no, an' lo'ded
+the bo't with warm things an' what he thought she'd need through the
+winter. He come home with the sheep an' left the other things by the
+house, but she never so much as looked out o' the window. She done it
+for a penance. She must have wanted to see Edward by that time.”
+
+Mrs. Fosdick was fidgeting with eagerness to speak.
+
+“Some thought the first cold snap would set her ashore, but she always
+remained,” concluded Mrs. Todd soberly.
+
+“Talk about the men not having any curiosity!” exclaimed Mrs. Fosdick
+scornfully. “Why, the waters round Shell-heap Island were white with
+sails all that fall. 'Twas never called no great of a fishin'-ground
+before. Many of 'em made excuse to go ashore to get water at the spring;
+but at last she spoke to a bo't-load, very dignified and calm, and said
+that she'd like it better if they'd make a practice of getting water to
+Black Island or somewheres else and leave her alone, except in case of
+accident or trouble. But there was one man who had always set everything
+by her from a boy. He'd have married her if the other hadn't come about
+an' spoilt his chance, and he used to get close to the island, before
+light, on his way out fishin', and throw a little bundle way up the
+green slope front o' the house. His sister told me she happened to see,
+the first time, what a pretty choice he made o' useful things that a
+woman would feel lost without. He stood off fishin', and could see them
+in the grass all day, though sometimes she'd come out and walk right
+by them. There was other bo'ts near, out after mackerel. But early next
+morning his present was gone. He didn't presume too much, but once he
+took her a nice firkin o' things he got up to Portland, and when spring
+come he landed her a hen and chickens in a nice little coop. There was a
+good many old friends had Joanna on their minds.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Todd, losing her sad reserve in the growing sympathy
+of these reminiscences. “How everybody used to notice whether there
+was smoke out of the chimney! The Black Island folks could see her with
+their spy-glass, and if they'd ever missed getting some sign o' life
+they'd have sent notice to her folks. But after the first year or two
+Joanna was more and more forgotten as an every-day charge. Folks lived
+very simple in those days, you know,” she continued, as Mrs. Fosdick's
+knitting was taking much thought at the moment. “I expect there was
+always plenty of driftwood thrown up, and a poor failin' patch of
+spruces covered all the north side of the island, so she always had
+something to burn. She was very fond of workin' in the garden ashore,
+and that first summer she began to till the little field out there, and
+raised a nice parcel o' potatoes. She could fish, o' course, and there
+was all her clams an' lobsters. You can always live well in any wild
+place by the sea when you'd starve to death up country, except 'twas
+berry time. Joanna had berries out there, blackberries at least,
+and there was a few herbs in case she needed them. Mullein in great
+quantities and a plant o' wormwood I remember seeing once when I
+stayed there, long before she fled out to Shell-heap. Yes, I recall the
+wormwood, which is always a planted herb, so there must have been folks
+there before the Todds' day. A growin' bush makes the best gravestone;
+I expect that wormwood always stood for somebody's solemn monument.
+Catnip, too, is a very endurin' herb about an old place.”
+
+“But what I want to know is what she did for other things,” interrupted
+Mrs. Fosdick. “Almiry, what did she do for clothin' when she needed to
+replenish, or risin' for her bread, or the piece-bag that no woman can
+live long without?”
+
+“Or company,” suggested Mrs. Todd. “Joanna was one that loved her
+friends. There must have been a terrible sight o' long winter evenin's
+that first year.”
+
+“There was her hens,” suggested Mrs. Fosdick, after reviewing the
+melancholy situation. “She never wanted the sheep after that first
+season. There wa'n't no proper pasture for sheep after the June grass
+was past, and she ascertained the fact and couldn't bear to see them
+suffer; but the chickens done well. I remember sailin' by one spring
+afternoon, an' seein' the coops out front o' the house in the sun. How
+long was it before you went out with the minister? You were the first
+ones that ever really got ashore to see Joanna.”
+
+I had been reflecting upon a state of society which admitted such
+personal freedom and a voluntary hermitage. There was something
+mediaeval in the behavior of poor Joanna Todd under a disappointment of
+the heart. The two women had drawn closer together, and were talking on,
+quite unconscious of a listener.
+
+“Poor Joanna!” said Mrs. Todd again, and sadly shook her head as if
+there were things one could not speak about.
+
+“I called her a great fool,” declared Mrs. Fosdick, with spirit, “but I
+pitied her then, and I pity her far more now. Some other minister would
+have been a great help to her,--one that preached self-forgetfulness and
+doin' for others to cure our own ills; but Parson Dimmick was a vague
+person, well meanin', but very numb in his feelin's. I don't suppose at
+that troubled time Joanna could think of any way to mend her troubles
+except to run off and hide.”
+
+“Mother used to say she didn't see how Joanna lived without having
+nobody to do for, getting her own meals and tending her own poor self
+day in an' day out,” said Mrs. Todd sorrowfully.
+
+“There was the hens,” repeated Mrs. Fosdick kindly. “I expect she soon
+came to makin' folks o' them. No, I never went to work to blame Joanna,
+as some did. She was full o' feeling, and her troubles hurt her more
+than she could bear. I see it all now as I couldn't when I was young.”
+
+“I suppose in old times they had their shut-up convents for just such
+folks,” said Mrs. Todd, as if she and her friend had disagreed about
+Joanna once, and were now in happy harmony. She seemed to speak with new
+openness and freedom. “Oh yes, I was only too pleased when the Reverend
+Mr. Dimmick invited me to go out with him. He hadn't been very long in
+the place when Joanna left home and friends. 'Twas one day that next
+summer after she went, and I had been married early in the spring. He
+felt that he ought to go out and visit her. She was a member of the
+church, and might wish to have him consider her spiritual state. I
+wa'n't so sure o' that, but I always liked Joanna, and I'd come to be
+her cousin by marriage. Nathan an' I had conversed about goin' out to
+pay her a visit, but he got his chance to sail sooner'n he expected. He
+always thought everything of her, and last time he come home, knowing
+nothing of her change, he brought her a beautiful coral pin from a port
+he'd touched at somewheres up the Mediterranean. So I wrapped the little
+box in a nice piece of paper and put it in my pocket, and picked her a
+bunch of fresh lemon balm, and off we started.”
+
+Mrs. Fosdick laughed. “I remember hearin' about your trials on the
+v'y'ge,” she said.
+
+“Why, yes,” continued Mrs. Todd in her company manner. “I picked her the
+balm, an' we started. Why, yes, Susan, the minister liked to have cost
+me my life that day. He would fasten the sheet, though I advised against
+it. He said the rope was rough an' cut his hand. There was a fresh
+breeze, an' he went on talking rather high flown, an' I felt some
+interested. All of a sudden there come up a gust, and he gave a screech
+and stood right up and called for help, 'way out there to sea. I knocked
+him right over into the bottom o' the bo't, getting by to catch hold of
+the sheet an' untie it. He wasn't but a little man; I helped him right
+up after the squall passed, and made a handsome apology to him, but he
+did act kind o' offended.”
+
+“I do think they ought not to settle them landlocked folks in parishes
+where they're liable to be on the water,” insisted Mrs. Fosdick. “Think
+of the families in our parish that was scattered all about the bay, and
+what a sight o' sails you used to see, in Mr. Dimmick's day, standing
+across to the mainland on a pleasant Sunday morning, filled with
+church-going folks, all sure to want him some time or other! You
+couldn't find no doctor that would stand up in the boat and screech if a
+flaw struck her.”
+
+“Old Dr. Bennett had a beautiful sailboat, didn't he?” responded Mrs.
+Todd. “And how well he used to brave the weather! Mother always said
+that in time o' trouble that tall white sail used to look like an
+angel's wing comin' over the sea to them that was in pain. Well, there's
+a difference in gifts. Mr. Dimmick was not without light.”
+
+“'Twas light o' the moon, then,” snapped Mrs. Fosdick; “he was pompous
+enough, but I never could remember a single word he said. There, go on,
+Mis' Todd; I forget a great deal about that day you went to see poor
+Joanna.”
+
+“I felt she saw us coming, and knew us a great way off; yes, I seemed to
+feel it within me,” said our friend, laying down her knitting. “I kept
+my seat, and took the bo't inshore without saying a word; there was a
+short channel that I was sure Mr. Dimmick wasn't acquainted with, and
+the tide was very low. She never came out to warn us off nor anything,
+and I thought, as I hauled the bo't up on a wave and let the Reverend
+Mr. Dimmick step out, that it was somethin' gained to be safe ashore.
+There was a little smoke out o' the chimney o' Joanna's house, and it
+did look sort of homelike and pleasant with wild mornin'-glory vines
+trained up; an' there was a plot o' flowers under the front window,
+portulacas and things. I believe she'd made a garden once, when she was
+stopping there with her father, and some things must have seeded in. It
+looked as if she might have gone over to the other side of the island.
+'Twas neat and pretty all about the house, and a lovely day in July.
+We walked up from the beach together very sedate, and I felt for poor
+Nathan's little pin to see if 'twas safe in my dress pocket. All of a
+sudden Joanna come right to the fore door and stood there, not sayin' a
+word.”
+
+
+
+
+XIV. The Hermitage
+
+MY COMPANION and I had been so intent upon the subject of the
+conversation that we had not heard any one open the gate, but at this
+moment, above the noise of the rain, we heard a loud knocking. We were
+all startled as we sat by the fire, and Mrs. Todd rose hastily and went
+to answer the call, leaving her rocking-chair in violent motion. Mrs.
+Fosdick and I heard an anxious voice at the door speaking of a sick
+child, and Mrs. Todd's kind, motherly voice inviting the messenger in:
+then we waited in silence. There was a sound of heavy dropping of
+rain from the eaves, and the distant roar and undertone of the sea.
+My thoughts flew back to the lonely woman on her outer island; what
+separation from humankind she must have felt, what terror and sadness,
+even in a summer storm like this!
+
+“You send right after the doctor if she ain't better in half an hour,”
+ said Mrs. Todd to her worried customer as they parted; and I felt a
+warm sense of comfort in the evident resources of even so small a
+neighborhood, but for the poor hermit Joanna there was no neighbor on a
+winter night.
+
+
+“How did she look?” demanded Mrs. Fosdick, without preface, as our large
+hostess returned to the little room with a mist about her from standing
+long in the wet doorway, and the sudden draught of her coming beat out
+the smoke and flame from the Franklin stove. “How did poor Joanna look?”
+
+“She was the same as ever, except I thought she looked smaller,”
+ answered Mrs. Todd after thinking a moment; perhaps it was only a last
+considering thought about her patient. “Yes, she was just the same, and
+looked very nice, Joanna did. I had been married since she left home,
+an' she treated me like her own folks. I expected she'd look strange,
+with her hair turned gray in a night or somethin', but she wore a pretty
+gingham dress I'd often seen her wear before she went away; she must
+have kept it nice for best in the afternoons. She always had beautiful,
+quiet manners. I remember she waited till we were close to her, and then
+kissed me real affectionate, and inquired for Nathan before she shook
+hands with the minister, and then she invited us both in. 'Twas the same
+little house her father had built him when he was a bachelor, with one
+livin'-room, and a little mite of a bedroom out of it where she slept,
+but 'twas neat as a ship's cabin. There was some old chairs, an' a seat
+made of a long box that might have held boat tackle an' things to lock
+up in his fishin' days, and a good enough stove so anybody could cook
+and keep warm in cold weather. I went over once from home and stayed
+'most a week with Joanna when we was girls, and those young happy days
+rose up before me. Her father was busy all day fishin' or clammin'; he
+was one o' the pleasantest men in the world, but Joanna's mother had the
+grim streak, and never knew what 'twas to be happy. The first minute my
+eyes fell upon Joanna's face that day I saw how she had grown to look
+like Mis' Todd. 'Twas the mother right over again.”
+
+“Oh dear me!” said Mrs. Fosdick.
+
+“Joanna had done one thing very pretty. There was a little piece o'
+swamp on the island where good rushes grew plenty, and she'd gathered
+'em, and braided some beautiful mats for the floor and a thick cushion
+for the long bunk. She'd showed a good deal of invention; you see
+there was a nice chance to pick up pieces o' wood and boards that drove
+ashore, and she'd made good use o' what she found. There wasn't no
+clock, but she had a few dishes on a shelf, and flowers set about in
+shells fixed to the walls, so it did look sort of homelike, though so
+lonely and poor. I couldn't keep the tears out o' my eyes, I felt so
+sad. I said to myself, I must get mother to come over an' see Joanna;
+the love in mother's heart would warm her, an' she might be able to
+advise.”
+
+“Oh no, Joanna was dreadful stern,” said Mrs. Fosdick.
+
+“We were all settin' down very proper, but Joanna would keep stealin'
+glances at me as if she was glad I come. She had but little to say; she
+was real polite an' gentle, and yet forbiddin'. The minister found it
+hard,” confessed Mrs. Todd; “he got embarrassed, an' when he put on his
+authority and asked her if she felt to enjoy religion in her present
+situation, an' she replied that she must be excused from answerin', I
+thought I should fly. She might have made it easier for him; after all,
+he was the minister and had taken some trouble to come out, though 'twas
+kind of cold an' unfeelin' the way he inquired. I thought he might have
+seen the little old Bible a-layin' on the shelf close by him, an' I
+wished he knew enough to just lay his hand on it an' read somethin'
+kind an' fatherly 'stead of accusin' her, an' then given poor Joanna his
+blessin' with the hope she might be led to comfort. He did offer prayer,
+but 'twas all about hearin' the voice o' God out o' the whirlwind; and I
+thought while he was goin' on that anybody that had spent the long cold
+winter all alone out on Shell-heap Island knew a good deal more about
+those things than he did. I got so provoked I opened my eyes and stared
+right at him.
+
+“She didn't take no notice, she kep' a nice respectful manner towards
+him, and when there come a pause she asked if he had any interest
+about the old Indian remains, and took down some queer stone gouges and
+hammers off of one of her shelves and showed them to him same's if
+he was a boy. He remarked that he'd like to walk over an' see the
+shell-heap; so she went right to the door and pointed him the way. I
+see then that she'd made her some kind o' sandal-shoes out o' the fine
+rushes to wear on her feet; she stepped light an' nice in 'em as shoes.”
+
+Mrs. Fosdick leaned back in her rocking-chair and gave a heavy sigh.
+
+“I didn't move at first, but I'd held out just as long as I could,” said
+Mrs. Todd, whose voice trembled a little. “When Joanna returned from the
+door, an' I could see that man's stupid back departin' among the wild
+rose bushes, I just ran to her an' caught her in my arms. I wasn't so
+big as I be now, and she was older than me, but I hugged her tight, just
+as if she was a child. 'Oh, Joanna dear,' I says, 'won't you come ashore
+an' live 'long o' me at the Landin', or go over to Green Island to
+mother's when winter comes? Nobody shall trouble you an' mother finds it
+hard bein' alone. I can't bear to leave you here'--and I burst right out
+crying. I'd had my own trials, young as I was, an' she knew it. Oh, I
+did entreat her; yes, I entreated Joanna.”
+
+“What did she say then?” asked Mrs. Fosdick, much moved.
+
+“She looked the same way, sad an' remote through it all,” said Mrs. Todd
+mournfully. “She took hold of my hand, and we sat down close together;
+'twas as if she turned round an' made a child of me. 'I haven't got
+no right to live with folks no more,' she said. 'You must never ask me
+again, Almiry: I've done the only thing I could do, and I've made my
+choice. I feel a great comfort in your kindness, but I don't deserve it.
+I have committed the unpardonable sin; you don't understand,' says she
+humbly. 'I was in great wrath and trouble, and my thoughts was so wicked
+towards God that I can't expect ever to be forgiven. I have come to
+know what it is to have patience, but I have lost my hope. You must tell
+those that ask how 'tis with me,' she said, 'an' tell them I want to
+be alone.' I couldn't speak; no, there wa'n't anything I could say, she
+seemed so above everything common. I was a good deal younger then than I
+be now, and I got Nathan's little coral pin out o' my pocket and put it
+into her hand; and when she saw it and I told her where it come from,
+her face did really light up for a minute, sort of bright an' pleasant.
+'Nathan an' I was always good friends; I'm glad he don't think hard of
+me,' says she. 'I want you to have it, Almiry, an' wear it for love
+o' both o' us,' and she handed it back to me. 'You give my love to
+Nathan,--he's a dear good man,' she said; 'an' tell your mother, if I
+should be sick she mustn't wish I could get well, but I want her to be
+the one to come.' Then she seemed to have said all she wanted to, as
+if she was done with the world, and we sat there a few minutes longer
+together. It was real sweet and quiet except for a good many birds and
+the sea rollin' up on the beach; but at last she rose, an' I did too,
+and she kissed me and held my hand in hers a minute, as if to say
+good-by; then she turned and went right away out o' the door and
+disappeared.
+
+“The minister come back pretty soon, and I told him I was all ready,
+and we started down to the bo't. He had picked up some round stones and
+things and was carrying them in his pocket-handkerchief; an' he sat down
+amidships without making any question, and let me take the rudder an'
+work the bo't, an' made no remarks for some time, until we sort of eased
+it off speaking of the weather, an' subjects that arose as we skirted
+Black Island, where two or three families lived belongin' to the parish.
+He preached next Sabbath as usual, somethin' high soundin' about the
+creation, and I couldn't help thinkin' he might never get no further; he
+seemed to know no remedies, but he had a great use of words.”
+
+Mrs. Fosdick sighed again. “Hearin' you tell about Joanna brings the
+time right back as if 'twas yesterday,” she said. “Yes, she was one o'
+them poor things that talked about the great sin; we don't seem to
+hear nothing about the unpardonable sin now, but you may say 'twas not
+uncommon then.”
+
+“I expect that if it had been in these days, such a person would be
+plagued to death with idle folks,” continued Mrs. Todd, after a long
+pause. “As it was, nobody trespassed on her; all the folks about the
+bay respected her an' her feelings; but as time wore on, after you
+left here, one after another ventured to make occasion to put somethin'
+ashore for her if they went that way. I know mother used to go to see
+her sometimes, and send William over now and then with something fresh
+an' nice from the farm. There is a point on the sheltered side where you
+can lay a boat close to shore an' land anything safe on the turf out o'
+reach o' the water. There were one or two others, old folks, that
+she would see, and now an' then she'd hail a passin' boat an' ask for
+somethin'; and mother got her to promise that she would make some sign
+to the Black Island folks if she wanted help. I never saw her myself to
+speak to after that day.”
+
+“I expect nowadays, if such a thing happened, she'd have gone out West
+to her uncle's folks or up to Massachusetts and had a change, an' come
+home good as new. The world's bigger an' freer than it used to be,”
+ urged Mrs. Fosdick.
+
+“No,” said her friend. “'Tis like bad eyesight, the mind of such a
+person: if your eyes don't see right there may be a remedy, but there's
+no kind of glasses to remedy the mind. No, Joanna was Joanna, and there
+she lays on her island where she lived and did her poor penance. She
+told mother the day she was dyin' that she always used to want to be
+fetched inshore when it come to the last; but she'd thought it over, and
+desired to be laid on the island, if 'twas thought right. So the funeral
+was out there, a Saturday afternoon in September. 'Twas a pretty day,
+and there wa'n't hardly a boat on the coast within twenty miles that
+didn't head for Shell-heap cram-full o' folks an' all real respectful,
+same's if she'd always stayed ashore and held her friends. Some went out
+o' mere curiosity, I don't doubt,--there's always such to every funeral;
+but most had real feelin', and went purpose to show it. She'd got most
+o' the wild sparrows as tame as could be, livin' out there so long among
+'em, and one flew right in and lit on the coffin an' begun to sing
+while Mr. Dimmick was speakin'. He was put out by it, an' acted as if he
+didn't know whether to stop or go on. I may have been prejudiced, but
+I wa'n't the only one thought the poor little bird done the best of the
+two.”
+
+“What became o' the man that treated her so, did you ever hear?” asked
+Mrs. Fosdick. “I know he lived up to Massachusetts for a while. Somebody
+who came from the same place told me that he was in trade there an'
+doin' very well, but that was years ago.”
+
+“I never heard anything more than that; he went to the war in one o' the
+early regiments. No, I never heard any more of him,” answered Mrs. Todd.
+“Joanna was another sort of person, and perhaps he showed good judgment
+in marryin' somebody else, if only he'd behaved straight-forward and
+manly. He was a shifty-eyed, coaxin' sort of man, that got what he
+wanted out o' folks, an' only gave when he wanted to buy, made friends
+easy and lost 'em without knowin' the difference. She'd had a piece o'
+work tryin' to make him walk accordin' to her right ideas, but she'd
+have had too much variety ever to fall into a melancholy. Some is meant
+to be the Joannas in this world, an' 'twas her poor lot.”
+
+
+
+
+XV. On Shell-heap Island
+
+SOME TIME AFTER Mrs. Fosdick's visit was over and we had returned to
+our former quietness, I was out sailing alone with Captain Bowden in his
+large boat. We were taking the crooked northeasterly channel seaward,
+and were well out from shore while it was still early in the afternoon.
+I found myself presently among some unfamiliar islands, and suddenly
+remembered the story of poor Joanna. There is something in the fact of a
+hermitage that cannot fail to touch the imagination; the recluses are
+a sad kindred, but they are never commonplace. Mrs. Todd had truly said
+that Joanna was like one of the saints in the desert; the loneliness of
+sorrow will forever keep alive their sad succession.
+
+“Where is Shell-heap Island?” I asked eagerly.
+
+“You see Shell-heap now, layin' 'way out beyond Black Island there,”
+ answered the captain, pointing with outstretched arm as he stood, and
+holding the rudder with his knee.
+
+“I should like very much to go there,” said I, and the captain, without
+comment, changed his course a little more to the eastward and let the
+reef out of his mainsail.
+
+“I don't know's we can make an easy landin' for ye,” he remarked
+doubtfully. “May get your feet wet; bad place to land. Trouble is I
+ought to have brought a tag-boat; but they clutch on to the water so,
+an' I do love to sail free. This gre't boat gets easy bothered with
+anything trailin'. 'Tain't breakin' much on the meetin'-house ledges;
+guess I can fetch in to Shell-heap.”
+
+“How long is it since Miss Joanna Todd died?” I asked, partly by way of
+explanation.
+
+“Twenty-two years come September,” answered the captain, after
+reflection. “She died the same year as my oldest boy was born, an' the
+town house was burnt over to the Port. I didn't know but you merely
+wanted to hunt for some o' them Indian relics. Long's you want to see
+where Joanna lived--No, 'tain't breakin' over the ledges; we'll manage
+to fetch across the shoals somehow, 'tis such a distance to go 'way
+round, and tide's a-risin',” he ended hopefully, and we sailed steadily
+on, the captain speechless with intent watching of a difficult course,
+until the small island with its low whitish promontory lay in full view
+before us under the bright afternoon sun.
+
+The month was August, and I had seen the color of the islands change
+from the fresh green of June to a sunburnt brown that made them look
+like stone, except where the dark green of the spruces and fir balsam
+kept the tint that even winter storms might deepen, but not fade. The
+few wind-bent trees on Shell-heap Island were mostly dead and gray,
+but there were some low-growing bushes, and a stripe of light green ran
+along just above the shore, which I knew to be wild morning-glories. As
+we came close I could see the high stone walls of a small square field,
+though there were no sheep left to assail it; and below, there was a
+little harbor-like cove where Captain Bowden was boldly running the
+great boat in to seek a landing-place. There was a crooked channel of
+deep water which led close up against the shore.
+
+“There, you hold fast for'ard there, an' wait for her to lift on the
+wave. You'll make a good landin' if you're smart; right on the port-hand
+side!” the captain called excitedly; and I, standing ready with high
+ambition, seized my chance and leaped over to the grassy bank.
+
+“I'm beat if I ain't aground after all!” mourned the captain
+despondently.
+
+But I could reach the bowsprit, and he pushed with the boat-hook, while
+the wind veered round a little as if on purpose and helped with the
+sail; so presently the boat was free and began to drift out from shore.
+
+“Used to call this p'int Joanna's wharf privilege, but 't has worn away
+in the weather since her time. I thought one or two bumps wouldn't hurt
+us none,--paint's got to be renewed, anyway,--but I never thought she'd
+tetch. I figured on shyin' by,” the captain apologized. “She's too gre't
+a boat to handle well in here; but I used to sort of shy by in Joanna's
+day, an' cast a little somethin' ashore--some apples or a couple o'
+pears if I had 'em--on the grass, where she'd be sure to see.”
+
+I stood watching while Captain Bowden cleverly found his way back to
+deeper water. “You needn't make no haste,” he called to me; “I'll keep
+within call. Joanna lays right up there in the far corner o' the field.
+There used to be a path led to the place. I always knew her well. I was
+out here to the funeral.”
+
+I found the path; it was touching to discover that this lonely spot was
+not without its pilgrims. Later generations will know less and less of
+Joanna herself, but there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude
+the world over,--the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet
+of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding;
+while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had
+been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men,
+too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live
+alone with her poor insistent human nature and the calms and passions of
+the sea and sky.
+
+The birds were flying all about the field; they fluttered up out of the
+grass at my feet as I walked along, so tame that I liked to think they
+kept some happy tradition from summer to summer of the safety of nests
+and good fellowship of mankind. Poor Joanna's house was gone except
+the stones of its foundations, and there was little trace of her flower
+garden except a single faded sprig of much-enduring French pinks, which
+a great bee and a yellow butterfly were befriending together. I drank at
+the spring, and thought that now and then some one would follow me from
+the busy, hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland,
+which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have
+watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with
+eternity well begun. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there
+is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret
+happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour
+or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of
+history they may belong.
+
+But as I stood alone on the island, in the sea-breeze, suddenly
+there came a sound of distant voices; gay voices and laughter from a
+pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys and girls. I knew, as
+if she had told me, that poor Joanna must have heard the like on many
+and many a summer afternoon, and must have welcomed the good cheer
+in spite of hopelessness and winter weather, and all the sorrow and
+disappointment in the world.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. The Great Expedition
+
+MRS. TODD never by any chance gave warning over night of her great
+projects and adventures by sea and land. She first came to an
+understanding with the primal forces of nature, and never trusted to any
+preliminary promise of good weather, but examined the day for herself in
+its infancy. Then, if the stars were propitious, and the wind blew
+from a quarter of good inheritance whence no surprises of sea-turns or
+southwest sultriness might be feared, long before I was fairly awake I
+used to hear a rustle and knocking like a great mouse in the walls, and
+an impatient tread on the steep garret stairs that led to Mrs. Todd's
+chief place of storage. She went and came as if she had already started
+on her expedition with utmost haste and kept returning for something
+that was forgotten. When I appeared in quest of my breakfast, she would
+be absent-minded and sparing of speech, as if I had displeased her,
+and she was now, by main force of principle, holding herself back from
+altercation and strife of tongues.
+
+These signs of a change became familiar to me in the course of time,
+and Mrs. Todd hardly noticed some plain proofs of divination one August
+morning when I said, without preface, that I had just seen the Beggs'
+best chaise go by, and that we should have to take the grocery. Mrs.
+Todd was alert in a moment.
+
+“There! I might have known!” she exclaimed. “It's the 15th of August,
+when he goes and gets his money. He heired an annuity from an uncle o'
+his on his mother's side. I understood the uncle said none o' Sam Begg's
+wife's folks should make free with it, so after Sam's gone it'll all be
+past an' spent, like last summer. That's what Sam prospers on now, if
+you can call it prosperin'. Yes, I might have known. 'Tis the 15th o'
+August with him, an' he gener'ly stops to dinner with a cousin's widow
+on the way home. Feb'uary n' August is the times. Takes him 'bout all
+day to go an' come.”
+
+I heard this explanation with interest. The tone of Mrs. Todd's voice
+was complaining at the last.
+
+“I like the grocery just as well as the chaise,” I hastened to say,
+referring to a long-bodied high wagon with a canopy-top, like an
+attenuated four-posted bedstead on wheels, in which we sometimes
+journeyed. “We can put things in behind--roots and flowers and
+raspberries, or anything you are going after--much better than if we had
+the chaise.”
+
+Mrs. Todd looked stony and unwilling. “I counted upon the chaise,” she
+said, turning her back to me, and roughly pushing back all the quiet
+tumblers on the cupboard shelf as if they had been impertinent. “Yes, I
+desired the chaise for once. I ain't goin' berryin' nor to fetch home no
+more wilted vegetation this year. Season's about past, except for a poor
+few o' late things,” she added in a milder tone. “I'm goin' up country.
+No, I ain't intendin' to go berryin'. I've been plottin' for it the past
+fortnight and hopin' for a good day.”
+
+“Would you like to have me go too?” I asked frankly, but not without a
+humble fear that I might have mistaken the purpose of this latest plan.
+
+“Oh certain, dear!” answered my friend affectionately. “Oh no, I never
+thought o' any one else for comp'ny, if it's convenient for you, long's
+poor mother ain't come. I ain't nothin' like so handy with a conveyance
+as I be with a good bo't. Comes o' my early bringing-up. I expect we've
+got to make that great high wagon do. The tires want settin' and 'tis
+all loose-jointed, so I can hear it shackle the other side o' the ridge.
+We'll put the basket in front. I ain't goin' to have it bouncin' an'
+twirlin' all the way. Why, I've been makin' some nice hearts and rounds
+to carry.”
+
+These were signs of high festivity, and my interest deepened moment by
+moment.
+
+“I'll go down to the Beggs' and get the horse just as soon as I finish
+my breakfast,” said I. “Then we can start whenever you are ready.”
+
+Mrs. Todd looked cloudy again. “I don't know but you look nice enough to
+go just as you be,” she suggested doubtfully. “No, you wouldn't want to
+wear that pretty blue dress o' yourn 'way up country. 'Taint dusty now,
+but it may be comin' home. No, I expect you'd rather not wear that and
+the other hat.”
+
+“Oh yes. I shouldn't think of wearing these clothes,” said I, with
+sudden illumination. “Why, if we're going up country and are likely to
+see some of your friends, I'll put on my blue dress, and you must wear
+your watch; I am not going at all if you mean to wear the big hat.”
+
+“Now you're behavin' pretty,” responded Mrs. Todd, with a gay toss of
+her head and a cheerful smile, as she came across the room, bringing
+a saucerful of wild raspberries, a pretty piece of salvage from
+supper-time. “I was cast down when I see you come to breakfast. I didn't
+think 'twas just what you'd select to wear to the reunion, where you're
+goin' to meet everybody.”
+
+“What reunion do you mean?” I asked, not without amazement. “Not the
+Bowden Family's? I thought that was going to take place in September.”
+
+“To-day's the day. They sent word the middle o' the week. I thought you
+might have heard of it. Yes, they changed the day. I been thinkin' we'd
+talk it over, but you never can tell beforehand how it's goin' to be,
+and 'taint worth while to wear a day all out before it comes.” Mrs. Todd
+gave no place to the pleasures of anticipation, but she spoke like
+the oracle that she was. “I wish mother was here to go,” she continued
+sadly. “I did look for her last night, and I couldn't keep back the
+tears when the dark really fell and she wa'n't here, she does so enjoy
+a great occasion. If William had a mite o' snap an' ambition, he'd take
+the lead at such a time. Mother likes variety, and there ain't but a
+few nice opportunities 'round here, an' them she has to miss 'less she
+contrives to get ashore to me. I do re'lly hate to go to the reunion
+without mother, an' 'tis a beautiful day; everybody'll be asking where
+she is. Once she'd have got here anyway. Poor mother's beginnin' to feel
+her age.”
+
+“Why, there's your mother now!” I exclaimed with joy, I was so glad to
+see the dear old soul again. “I hear her voice at the gate.” But Mrs.
+Todd was out of the door before me.
+
+There, sure enough, stood Mrs. Blackett, who must have left Green Island
+before daylight. She had climbed the steep road from the waterside so
+eagerly that she was out of breath, and was standing by the garden fence
+to rest. She held an old-fashioned brown wicker cap-basket in her hand,
+as if visiting were a thing of every day, and looked up at us as pleased
+and triumphant as a child.
+
+“Oh, what a poor, plain garden! Hardly a flower in it except your bush
+o' balm!” she said. “But you do keep your garden neat, Almiry. Are you
+both well, an' goin' up country with me?” She came a step or two closer
+to meet us, with quaint politeness and quite as delightful as if she
+were at home. She dropped a quick little curtsey before Mrs. Todd.
+
+“There, mother, what a girl you be! I am so pleased! I was just
+bewailin' you,” said the daughter, with unwonted feeling. “I was just
+bewailin' you, I was so disappointed, an' I kep' myself awake a good
+piece o' the night scoldin' poor William. I watched for the boat till
+I was ready to shed tears yisterday, and when 'twas comin' dark I kep'
+making errands out to the gate an' down the road to see if you wa'n't in
+the doldrums somewhere down the bay.”
+
+“There was a head-wind, as you know,” said Mrs. Blackett, giving me
+the cap-basket, and holding my hand affectionately as we walked up the
+clean-swept path to the door. “I was partly ready to come, but dear
+William said I should be all tired out and might get cold, havin'
+to beat all the way in. So we give it up, and set down and spent the
+evenin' together. It was a little rough and windy outside, and I guess
+'twas better judgment; we went to bed very early and made a good start
+just at daylight. It's been a lovely mornin' on the water. William
+thought he'd better fetch across beyond Bird Rocks, rowin' the greater
+part o' the way; then we sailed from there right over to the landin',
+makin' only one tack. William'll be in again for me to-morrow, so I can
+come back here an' rest me over night, an' go to meetin' to-morrow, and
+have a nice, good visit.”
+
+“She was just havin' her breakfast,” said Mrs. Todd, who had listened
+eagerly to the long explanation without a word of disapproval, while her
+face shone more and more with joy. “You just sit right down an' have
+a cup of tea and rest you while we make our preparations. Oh, I am so
+gratified to think you've come! Yes, she was just havin' her breakfast,
+and we were speakin' of you. Where's William?”
+
+“He went right back; said he expected some schooners in about noon after
+bait, but he'll come an' have his dinner with us tomorrow, unless it
+rains; then next day. I laid his best things out all ready,” explained
+Mrs. Blackett, a little anxiously. “This wind will serve him nice all
+the way home. Yes, I will take a cup of tea, dear,--a cup of tea is
+always good; and then I'll rest a minute and be all ready to start.”
+
+“I do feel condemned for havin' such hard thoughts o' William,” openly
+confessed Mrs. Todd. She stood before us so large and serious that we
+both laughed and could not find it in our hearts to convict so rueful a
+culprit. “He shall have a good dinner to-morrow, if it can be got, and
+I shall be real glad to see William,” the confession ended handsomely,
+while Mrs. Blackett smiled approval and made haste to praise the tea.
+Then I hurried away to make sure of the grocery wagon. Whatever might be
+the good of the reunion, I was going to have the pleasure and delight of
+a day in Mrs. Blackett's company, not to speak of Mrs. Todd's.
+
+The early morning breeze was still blowing, and the warm, sunshiny air
+was of some ethereal northern sort, with a cool freshness as it
+came over new-fallen snow. The world was filled with a fragrance of
+fir-balsam and the faintest flavor of seaweed from the ledges, bare and
+brown at low tide in the little harbor. It was so still and so early
+that the village was but half awake. I could hear no voices but those of
+the birds, small and great,--the constant song sparrows, the clink of
+a yellow-hammer over in the woods, and the far conversation of some
+deliberate crows. I saw William Blackett's escaping sail already far
+from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window
+as I passed by, watching for some one who never came. I tried to speak
+to him, but he did not see me. There was a patient look on the old man's
+face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom
+to speak his own language or find companionship.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. A Country Road
+
+WHATEVER DOUBTS and anxieties I may have had about the inconvenience of
+the Begg's high wagon for a person of Mrs. Blackett's age and shortness,
+they were happily overcome by the aid of a chair and her own valiant
+spirit. Mrs. Todd bestowed great care upon seating us as if we were
+taking passage by boat, but she finally pronounced that we were properly
+trimmed. When we had gone only a little way up the hill she remembered
+that she had left the house door wide open, though the large key was
+safe in her pocket. I offered to run back, but my offer was met with
+lofty scorn, and we lightly dismissed the matter from our minds, until
+two or three miles further on we met the doctor, and Mrs. Todd asked him
+to stop and ask her nearest neighbor to step over and close the door if
+the dust seemed to blow in the afternoon.
+
+“She'll be there in her kitchen; she'll hear you the minute you call;
+'twont give you no delay,” said Mrs. Todd to the doctor. “Yes, Mis'
+Dennett's right there, with the windows all open. It isn't as if my fore
+door opened right on the road, anyway.” At which proof of composure Mrs.
+Blackett smiled wisely at me.
+
+The doctor seemed delighted to see our guest; they were evidently the
+warmest friends, and I saw a look of affectionate confidence in their
+eyes. The good man left his carriage to speak to us, but as he took Mrs.
+Blackett's hand he held it a moment, and, as if merely from force of
+habit, felt her pulse as they talked; then to my delight he gave the
+firm old wrist a commending pat.
+
+“You're wearing well; good for another ten years at this rate,” he
+assured her cheerfully, and she smiled back. “I like to keep a strict
+account of my old stand-bys,” and he turned to me. “Don't you let Mrs.
+Todd overdo to-day,--old folks like her are apt to be thoughtless;” and
+then we all laughed, and, parting, went our ways gayly.
+
+“I suppose he puts up with your rivalry the same as ever?” asked Mrs.
+Blackett. “You and he are as friendly as ever, I see, Almiry,” and
+Almira sagely nodded.
+
+“He's got too many long routes now to stop to 'tend to all his door
+patients,” she said, “especially them that takes pleasure in talkin'
+themselves over. The doctor and me have got to be kind of partners; he's
+gone a good deal, far an' wide. Looked tired, didn't he? I shall have to
+advise with him an' get him off for a good rest. He'll take the big boat
+from Rockland an' go off up to Boston an' mouse round among the other
+doctors, one in two or three years, and come home fresh as a boy. I
+guess they think consider'ble of him up there.” Mrs. Todd shook the
+reins and reached determinedly for the whip, as if she were compelling
+public opinion.
+
+Whatever energy and spirit the white horse had to begin with were soon
+exhausted by the steep hills and his discernment of a long expedition
+ahead. We toiled slowly along. Mrs. Blackett and I sat together, and
+Mrs. Todd sat alone in front with much majesty and the large basket of
+provisions. Part of the way the road was shaded by thick woods, but we
+also passed one farmhouse after another on the high uplands, which we
+all three regarded with deep interest, the house itself and the barns
+and garden-spots and poultry all having to suffer an inspection of the
+shrewdest sort. This was a highway quite new to me; in fact, most of my
+journeys with Mrs. Todd had been made afoot and between the roads, in
+open pasturelands. My friends stopped several times for brief dooryard
+visits, and made so many promises of stopping again on the way home
+that I began to wonder how long the expedition would last. I had often
+noticed how warmly Mrs. Todd was greeted by her friends, but it was
+hardly to be compared with the feeling now shown toward Mrs. Blackett.
+A look of delight came to the faces of those who recognized the plain,
+dear old figure beside me; one revelation after another was made of the
+constant interest and intercourse that had linked the far island and
+these scattered farms into a golden chain of love and dependence.
+
+“Now, we mustn't stop again if we can help it,” insisted Mrs. Todd at
+last. “You'll get tired, mother, and you'll think the less o' reunions.
+We can visit along here any day. There, if they ain't frying doughnuts
+in this next house, too! These are new folks, you know, from over St.
+George way; they took this old Talcot farm last year. 'Tis the best
+water on the road, and the check-rein's come undone--yes, we'd best
+delay a little and water the horse.”
+
+We stopped, and seeing a party of pleasure-seekers in holiday attire,
+the thin, anxious mistress of the farmhouse came out with wistful
+sympathy to hear what news we might have to give. Mrs. Blackett
+first spied her at the half-closed door, and asked with such cheerful
+directness if we were trespassing that, after a few words, she went back
+to her kitchen and reappeared with a plateful of doughnuts.
+
+“Entertainment for man and beast,” announced Mrs. Todd with
+satisfaction. “Why, we've perceived there was new doughnuts all along
+the road, but you're the first that has treated us.”
+
+Our new acquaintance flushed with pleasure, but said nothing.
+
+“They're very nice; you've had good luck with 'em,” pronounced Mrs.
+Todd. “Yes, we've observed there was doughnuts all the way along; if one
+house is frying all the rest is; 'tis so with a great many things.”
+
+“I don't suppose likely you're goin' up to the Bowden reunion?” asked
+the hostess as the white horse lifted his head and we were saying
+good-by.
+
+“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Blackett and Mrs. Todd and I, all together.
+
+“I am connected with the family. Yes, I expect to be there this
+afternoon. I've been lookin' forward to it,” she told us eagerly.
+
+“We shall see you there. Come and sit with us if it's convenient,” said
+dear Mrs. Blackett, and we drove away.
+
+“I wonder who she was before she was married?” said Mrs. Todd, who was
+usually unerring in matters of genealogy. “She must have been one of
+that remote branch that lived down beyond Thomaston. We can find out
+this afternoon. I expect that the families'll march together, or be
+sorted out some way. I'm willing to own a relation that has such proper
+ideas of doughnuts.”
+
+“I seem to see the family looks,” said Mrs. Blackett. “I wish we'd asked
+her name. She's a stranger, and I want to help make it pleasant for all
+such.”
+
+“She resembles Cousin Pa'lina Bowden about the forehead,” said Mrs. Todd
+with decision.
+
+We had just passed a piece of woodland that shaded the road, and come
+out to some open fields beyond, when Mrs. Todd suddenly reined in the
+horse as if somebody had stood on the roadside and stopped her. She even
+gave that quick reassuring nod of her head which was usually made to
+answer for a bow, but I discovered that she was looking eagerly at a
+tall ash-tree that grew just inside the field fence.
+
+“I thought 'twas goin' to do well,” she said complacently as we went on
+again. “Last time I was up this way that tree was kind of drooping and
+discouraged. Grown trees act that way sometimes, same's folks; then
+they'll put right to it and strike their roots off into new ground and
+start all over again with real good courage. Ash-trees is very likely to
+have poor spells; they ain't got the resolution of other trees.”
+
+I listened hopefully for more; it was this peculiar wisdom that made one
+value Mrs. Todd's pleasant company.
+
+“There's sometimes a good hearty tree growin' right out of the bare
+rock, out o' some crack that just holds the roots;” she went on to say,
+“right on the pitch o' one o' them bare stony hills where you can't seem
+to see a wheel-barrowful o' good earth in a place, but that tree'll keep
+a green top in the driest summer. You lay your ear down to the ground
+an' you'll hear a little stream runnin'. Every such tree has got its own
+livin' spring; there's folk made to match 'em.”
+
+I could not help turning to look at Mrs. Blackett, close beside me. Her
+hands were clasped placidly in their thin black woolen gloves, and
+she was looking at the flowery wayside as we went slowly along, with a
+pleased, expectant smile. I do not think she had heard a word about the
+trees.
+
+“I just saw a nice plant o' elecampane growin' back there,” she said
+presently to her daughter.
+
+“I haven't got my mind on herbs to-day,” responded Mrs. Todd, in the
+most matter-of-fact way. “I'm bent on seeing folks,” and she shook the
+reins again.
+
+I for one had no wish to hurry, it was so pleasant in the shady roads.
+The woods stood close to the road on the right; on the left were narrow
+fields and pastures where there were as many acres of spruces and pines
+as there were acres of bay and juniper and huckleberry, with a little
+turf between. When I thought we were in the heart of the inland country,
+we reached the top of a hill, and suddenly there lay spread out before
+us a wonderful great view of well-cleared fields that swept down to
+the wide water of a bay. Beyond this were distant shores like another
+country in the midday haze which half hid the hills beyond, and the
+faraway pale blue mountains on the northern horizon. There was a
+schooner with all sails set coming down the bay from a white village
+that was sprinkled on the shore, and there were many sailboats flitting
+about it. It was a noble landscape, and my eyes, which had grown used to
+the narrow inspection of a shaded roadside, could hardly take it in.
+
+“Why, it's the upper bay,” said Mrs. Todd. “You can see 'way over into
+the town of Fessenden. Those farms 'way over there are all in Fessenden.
+Mother used to have a sister that lived up that shore. If we started as
+early's we could on a summer mornin', we couldn't get to her place from
+Green Island till late afternoon, even with a fair, steady breeze, and
+you had to strike the time just right so as to fetch up 'long o' the
+tide and land near the flood. 'Twas ticklish business, an' we didn't
+visit back an' forth as much as mother desired. You have to go 'way down
+the co'st to Cold Spring Light an' round that long point,--up here's
+what they call the Back Shore.”
+
+“No, we were 'most always separated, my dear sister and me, after the
+first year she was married,” said Mrs. Blackett. “We had our little
+families an' plenty o' cares. We were always lookin' forward to the time
+we could see each other more. Now and then she'd get out to the island
+for a few days while her husband'd go fishin'; and once he stopped with
+her an' two children, and made him some flakes right there and cured all
+his fish for winter. We did have a beautiful time together, sister an'
+me; she used to look back to it long's she lived.
+
+“I do love to look over there where she used to live,” Mrs. Blackett
+went on as we began to go down the hill. “It seems as if she must still
+be there, though she's long been gone. She loved their farm,--she didn't
+see how I got so used to our island; but somehow I was always happy from
+the first.”
+
+“Yes, it's very dull to me up among those slow farms,” declared Mrs.
+Todd. “The snow troubles 'em in winter. They're all besieged by winter,
+as you may say; 'tis far better by the shore than up among such places.
+I never thought I should like to live up country.”
+
+“Why, just see the carriages ahead of us on the next rise!” exclaimed
+Mrs. Blackett. “There's going to be a great gathering, don't you believe
+there is, Almiry? It hasn't seemed up to now as if anybody was going but
+us. An' 'tis such a beautiful day, with yesterday cool and pleasant to
+work an' get ready, I shouldn't wonder if everybody was there, even the
+slow ones like Phebe Ann Brock.”
+
+Mrs. Blackett's eyes were bright with excitement, and even Mrs. Todd
+showed remarkable enthusiasm. She hurried the horse and caught up with
+the holiday-makers ahead. “There's all the Dep'fords goin', six in the
+wagon,” she told us joyfully; “an' Mis' Alva Tilley's folks are now
+risin' the hill in their new carry-all.”
+
+Mrs. Blackett pulled at the neat bow of her black bonnet-strings, and
+tied them again with careful precision. “I believe your bonnet's on
+a little bit sideways, dear,” she advised Mrs. Todd as if she were a
+child; but Mrs. Todd was too much occupied to pay proper heed. We began
+to feel a new sense of gayety and of taking part in the great occasion
+as we joined the little train.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. The Bowden Reunion
+
+IT IS VERY RARE in country life, where high days and holidays are few,
+that any occasion of general interest proves to be less than great. Such
+is the hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature that, once
+given an outlet, it shines forth with almost volcanic light and heat. In
+quiet neighborhoods such inward force does not waste itself upon those
+petty excitements of every day that belong to cities, but when, at
+long intervals, the altars to patriotism, to friendship, to the ties
+of kindred, are reared in our familiar fields, then the fires glow, the
+flames come up as if from the inexhaustible burning heart of the earth;
+the primal fires break through the granite dust in which our souls are
+set. Each heart is warm and every face shines with the ancient light.
+Such a day as this has transfiguring powers, and easily makes friends of
+those who have been cold-hearted, and gives to those who are dumb their
+chance to speak, and lends some beauty to the plainest face.
+
+“Oh, I expect I shall meet friends today that I haven't seen in a long
+while,” said Mrs. Blackett with deep satisfaction. “'Twill bring out a
+good many of the old folks, 'tis such a lovely day. I'm always glad not
+to have them disappointed.”
+
+“I guess likely the best of 'em'll be there,” answered Mrs. Todd with
+gentle humor, stealing a glance at me. “There's one thing certain:
+there's nothing takes in this whole neighborhood like anything related
+to the Bowdens. Yes, I do feel that when you call upon the Bowdens you
+may expect most families to rise up between the Landing and the far end
+of the Back Cove. Those that aren't kin by blood are kin by marriage.”
+
+“There used to be an old story goin' about when I was a girl,” said Mrs.
+Blackett, with much amusement. “There was a great many more Bowdens then
+than there are now, and the folks was all setting in meeting a dreadful
+hot Sunday afternoon, and a scatter-witted little bound girl came
+running to the meetin'-house door all out o' breath from somewheres in
+the neighborhood. 'Mis' Bowden, Mis' Bowden!' says she. 'Your baby's in
+a fit!' They used to tell that the whole congregation was up on its
+feet in a minute and right out into the aisles. All the Mis' Bowdens
+was setting right out for home; the minister stood there in the pulpit
+tryin' to keep sober, an' all at once he burst right out laughin'. He
+was a very nice man, they said, and he said he'd better give 'em the
+benediction, and they could hear the sermon next Sunday, so he kept it
+over. My mother was there, and she thought certain 'twas me.”
+
+“None of our family was ever subject to fits,” interrupted Mrs. Todd
+severely. “No, we never had fits, none of us; and 'twas lucky we didn't
+'way out there to Green Island. Now these folks right in front; dear
+sakes knows the bunches o' soothing catnip an' yarrow I've had to favor
+old Mis' Evins with dryin'! You can see it right in their expressions,
+all them Evins folks. There, just you look up to the crossroads,
+mother,” she suddenly exclaimed. “See all the teams ahead of us. And,
+oh, look down on the bay; yes, look down on the bay! See what a sight o'
+boats, all headin' for the Bowden place cove!”
+
+“Oh, ain't it beautiful!” said Mrs. Blackett, with all the delight of a
+girl. She stood up in the high wagon to see everything, and when she sat
+down again she took fast hold of my hand.
+
+“Hadn't you better urge the horse a little, Almiry?” she asked. “He's
+had it easy as we came along, and he can rest when we get there. The
+others are some little ways ahead, and I don't want to lose a minute.”
+
+We watched the boats drop their sails one by one in the cove as we
+drove along the high land. The old Bowden house stood, low-storied and
+broad-roofed, in its green fields as if it were a motherly brown hen
+waiting for the flock that came straying toward it from every direction.
+The first Bowden settler had made his home there, and it was still the
+Bowden farm; five generations of sailors and farmers and soldiers
+had been its children. And presently Mrs. Blackett showed me the
+stone-walled burying-ground that stood like a little fort on a knoll
+overlooking the bay, but, as she said, there were plenty of scattered
+Bowdens who were not laid there,--some lost at sea, and some out West,
+and some who died in the war; most of the home graves were those of
+women.
+
+We could see now that there were different footpaths from along shore
+and across country. In all these there were straggling processions
+walking in single file, like old illustrations of the Pilgrim's
+Progress. There was a crowd about the house as if huge bees were
+swarming in the lilac bushes. Beyond the fields and cove a higher point
+of land ran out into the bay, covered with woods which must have kept
+away much of the northwest wind in winter. Now there was a pleasant look
+of shade and shelter there for the great family meeting.
+
+We hurried on our way, beginning to feel as if we were very late, and it
+was a great satisfaction at last to turn out of the stony highroad into
+a green lane shaded with old apple-trees. Mrs. Todd encouraged the horse
+until he fairly pranced with gayety as we drove round to the front of
+the house on the soft turf. There was an instant cry of rejoicing, and
+two or three persons ran toward us from the busy group.
+
+“Why, dear Mis' Blackett!--here's Mis' Blackett!” I heard them say, as
+if it were pleasure enough for one day to have a sight of her. Mrs. Todd
+turned to me with a lovely look of triumph and self-forgetfulness. An
+elderly man who wore the look of a prosperous sea-captain put up both
+arms and lifted Mrs. Blackett down from the high wagon like a child, and
+kissed her with hearty affection. “I was master afraid she wouldn't be
+here,” he said, looking at Mrs. Todd with a face like a happy sunburnt
+schoolboy, while everybody crowded round to give their welcome.
+
+“Mother's always the queen,” said Mrs. Todd. “Yes, they'll all make
+everything of mother; she'll have a lovely time to-day. I wouldn't have
+had her miss it, and there won't be a thing she'll ever regret, except
+to mourn because William wa'n't here.”
+
+Mrs. Blackett having been properly escorted to the house, Mrs. Todd
+received her own full share of honor, and some of the men, with a simple
+kindness that was the soul of chivalry, waited upon us and our baskets
+and led away the white horse. I already knew some of Mrs. Todd's friends
+and kindred, and felt like an adopted Bowden in this happy moment. It
+seemed to be enough for anyone to have arrived by the same conveyance as
+Mrs. Blackett, who presently had her court inside the house, while Mrs.
+Todd, large, hospitable, and preeminent, was the centre of a rapidly
+increasing crowd about the lilac bushes. Small companies were
+continually coming up the long green slope from the water, and nearly
+all the boats had come to shore. I counted three or four that were
+baffled by the light breeze, but before long all the Bowdens, small and
+great, seemed to have assembled, and we started to go up to the grove
+across the field.
+
+Out of the chattering crowd of noisy children, and large-waisted women
+whose best black dresses fell straight to the ground in generous folds,
+and sunburnt men who looked as serious as if it were town-meeting day,
+there suddenly came silence and order. I saw the straight, soldierly
+little figure of a man who bore a fine resemblance to Mrs. Blackett, and
+who appeared to marshal us with perfect ease. He was imperative enough,
+but with a grand military sort of courtesy, and bore himself with solemn
+dignity of importance. We were sorted out according to some clear design
+of his own, and stood as speechless as a troop to await his orders. Even
+the children were ready to march together, a pretty flock, and at
+the last moment Mrs. Blackett and a few distinguished companions, the
+ministers and those who were very old, came out of the house together
+and took their places. We ranked by fours, and even then we made a long
+procession.
+
+There was a wide path mowed for us across the field, and, as we moved
+along, the birds flew up out of the thick second crop of clover, and
+the bees hummed as if it still were June. There was a flashing of
+white gulls over the water where the fleet of boats rode the low waves
+together in the cove, swaying their small masts as if they kept time to
+our steps. The plash of the water could be heard faintly, yet still be
+heard; we might have been a company of ancient Greeks going to celebrate
+a victory, or to worship the god of harvests, in the grove above. It was
+strangely moving to see this and to make part of it. The sky, the sea,
+have watched poor humanity at its rites so long; we were no more a New
+England family celebrating its own existence and simple progress; we
+carried the tokens and inheritance of all such households from which
+this had descended, and were only the latest of our line. We possessed
+the instincts of a far, forgotten childhood; I found myself thinking
+that we ought to be carrying green branches and singing as we went.
+So we came to the thick shaded grove still silent, and were set in
+our places by the straight trees that swayed together and let sunshine
+through here and there like a single golden leaf that flickered down,
+vanishing in the cool shade.
+
+The grove was so large that the great family looked far smaller than it
+had in the open field; there was a thick growth of dark pines and firs
+with an occasional maple or oak that gave a gleam of color like a bright
+window in the great roof. On three sides we could see the water, shining
+behind the tree-trunks, and feel the cool salt breeze that began to come
+up with the tide just as the day reached its highest point of heat. We
+could see the green sunlit field we had just crossed as if we looked
+out at it from a dark room, and the old house and its lilacs standing
+placidly in the sun, and the great barn with a stockade of carriages
+from which two or three care-taking men who had lingered were coming
+across the field together. Mrs. Todd had taken off her warm gloves and
+looked the picture of content.
+
+“There!” she exclaimed. “I've always meant to have you see this place,
+but I never looked for such a beautiful opportunity--weather an'
+occasion both made to match. Yes, it suits me: I don't ask no more. I
+want to know if you saw mother walkin' at the head! It choked me right
+up to see mother at the head, walkin' with the ministers,” and Mrs. Todd
+turned away to hide the feelings she could not instantly control.
+
+“Who was the marshal?” I hastened to ask. “Was he an old soldier?”
+
+“Don't he do well?” answered Mrs. Todd with satisfaction.
+
+“He don't often have such a chance to show off his gifts,” said Mrs.
+Caplin, a friend from the Landing who had joined us. “That's Sant
+Bowden; he always takes the lead, such days. Good for nothing else most
+o' his time; trouble is, he”--
+
+I turned with interest to hear the worst. Mrs. Caplin's tone was both
+zealous and impressive.
+
+“Stim'lates,” she explained scornfully.
+
+“No, Santin never was in the war,” said Mrs. Todd with lofty
+indifference. “It was a cause of real distress to him. He kep'
+enlistin', and traveled far an' wide about here, an' even took the bo't
+and went to Boston to volunteer; but he ain't a sound man, an' they
+wouldn't have him. They say he knows all their tactics, an' can tell all
+about the battle o' Waterloo well's he can Bunker Hill. I told him once
+the country'd lost a great general, an' I meant it, too.”
+
+“I expect you're near right,” said Mrs. Caplin, a little crestfallen and
+apologetic.
+
+“I be right,” insisted Mrs. Todd with much amiability. “'Twas most too
+bad to cramp him down to his peaceful trade, but he's a most excellent
+shoemaker at his best, an' he always says it's a trade that gives him
+time to think an' plan his maneuvers. Over to the Port they always
+invite him to march Decoration Day, same as the rest, an' he does look
+noble; he comes of soldier stock.”
+
+I had been noticing with great interest the curiously French type of
+face which prevailed in this rustic company. I had said to myself before
+that Mrs. Blackett was plainly of French descent, in both her appearance
+and her charming gifts, but this is not surprising when one has learned
+how large a proportion of the early settlers on this northern coast
+of New England were of Huguenot blood, and that it is the Norman
+Englishman, not the Saxon, who goes adventuring to a new world.
+
+“They used to say in old times,” said Mrs. Todd modestly, “that our
+family came of very high folks in France, and one of 'em was a great
+general in some o' the old wars. I sometimes think that Santin's ability
+has come 'way down from then. 'Tain't nothin' he's ever acquired; 'twas
+born in him. I don't know's he ever saw a fine parade, or met with those
+that studied up such things. He's figured it all out an' got his papers
+so he knows how to aim a cannon right for William's fish-house five
+miles out on Green Island, or up there on Burnt Island where the
+signal is. He had it all over to me one day, an' I tried hard to appear
+interested. His life's all in it, but he will have those poor gloomy
+spells come over him now an' then, an' then he has to drink.”
+
+Mrs. Caplin gave a heavy sigh.
+
+“There's a great many such strayaway folks, just as there is plants,”
+ continued Mrs. Todd, who was nothing if not botanical. “I know of just
+one sprig of laurel that grows over back here in a wild spot, an' I
+never could hear of no other on this coast. I had a large bunch brought
+me once from Massachusetts way, so I know it. This piece grows in
+an open spot where you'd think 'twould do well, but it's sort o'
+poor-lookin'. I've visited it time an' again, just to notice its poor
+blooms. 'Tis a real Sant Bowden, out of its own place.”
+
+Mrs. Caplin looked bewildered and blank. “Well, all I know is, last year
+he worked out some kind of plan so's to parade the county conference in
+platoons, and got 'em all flustered up tryin' to sense his ideas of a
+holler square,” she burst forth. “They was holler enough anyway after
+ridin' 'way down from up country into the salt air, and they'd been
+treated to a sermon on faith an' works from old Fayther Harlow that
+never knows when to cease. 'Twa'n't no time for tactics then,--they
+wa'n't a'thinkin' of the church military. Sant, he couldn't do nothin'
+with 'em. All he thinks of, when he sees a crowd, is how to march 'em.
+'Tis all very well when he don't 'tempt too much. He never did act like
+other folks.”
+
+“Ain't I just been maintainin' that he ain't like 'em?” urged Mrs. Todd
+decidedly. “Strange folks has got to have strange ways, for what I see.”
+
+“Somebody observed once that you could pick out the likeness of 'most
+every sort of a foreigner when you looked about you in our parish,” said
+Sister Caplin, her face brightening with sudden illumination. “I didn't
+see the bearin' of it then quite so plain. I always did think Mari'
+Harris resembled a Chinee.”
+
+“Mari' Harris was pretty as a child, I remember,” said the pleasant
+voice of Mrs. Blackett, who, after receiving the affectionate greetings
+of nearly the whole company, came to join us,--to see, as she insisted,
+that we were out of mischief.
+
+“Yes, Mari' was one o' them pretty little lambs that make dreadful
+homely old sheep,” replied Mrs. Todd with energy. “Cap'n Littlepage
+never'd look so disconsolate if she was any sort of a proper person
+to direct things. She might divert him; yes, she might divert the old
+gentleman, an' let him think he had his own way, 'stead o' arguing
+everything down to the bare bone. 'Twouldn't hurt her to sit down an'
+hear his great stories once in a while.”
+
+“The stories are very interesting,” I ventured to say.
+
+“Yes, you always catch yourself a-thinkin' what if they all was true,
+and he had the right of it,” answered Mrs. Todd. “He's a good sight
+better company, though dreamy, than such sordid creatur's as Mari'
+Harris.”
+
+“Live and let live,” said dear old Mrs. Blackett gently. “I haven't seen
+the captain for a good while, now that I ain't so constant to meetin',”
+ she added wistfully. “We always have known each other.”
+
+“Why, if it is a good pleasant day tomorrow, I'll get William to call
+an' invite the capt'in to dinner. William'll be in early so's to pass up
+the street without meetin' anybody.”
+
+“There, they're callin' out it's time to set the tables,” said Mrs.
+Caplin, with great excitement.
+
+“Here's Cousin Sarah Jane Blackett! Well, I am pleased, certain!”
+ exclaimed Mrs. Todd, with unaffected delight; and these kindred spirits
+met and parted with the promise of a good talk later on. After this
+there was no more time for conversation until we were seated in order at
+the long tables.
+
+“I'm one that always dreads seeing some o' the folks that I don't like,
+at such a time as this,” announced Mrs. Todd privately to me after a
+season of reflection. We were just waiting for the feast to begin. “You
+wouldn't think such a great creatur' 's I be could feel all over pins
+an' needles. I remember, the day I promised to Nathan, how it come over
+me, just's I was feelin' happy's I could, that I'd got to have an own
+cousin o' his for my near relation all the rest o' my life, an' it
+seemed as if die I should. Poor Nathan saw somethin' had crossed me,--he
+had very nice feelings,--and when he asked what 'twas, I told him. 'I
+never could like her myself,' said he. 'You sha'n't be bothered, dear,'
+he says; an' 'twas one o' the things that made me set a good deal by
+Nathan, he did not make a habit of always opposin', like some men.
+'Yes,' says I, 'but think o' Thanksgivin' times an' funerals; she's our
+relation, an' we've got to own her.' Young folks don't think o' those
+things. There she goes now, do let's pray her by!” said Mrs. Todd, with
+an alarming transition from general opinions to particular animosities.
+“I hate her just the same as I always did; but she's got on a real
+pretty dress. I do try to remember that she's Nathan's cousin. Oh dear,
+well; she's gone by after all, an' ain't seen me. I expected she'd
+come pleasantin' round just to show off an' say afterwards she was
+acquainted.”
+
+This was so different from Mrs. Todd's usual largeness of mind that I
+had a moment's uneasiness; but the cloud passed quickly over her spirit,
+and was gone with the offender.
+
+There never was a more generous out-of-door feast along the coast then
+the Bowden family set forth that day. To call it a picnic would make it
+seem trivial. The great tables were edged with pretty oak-leaf
+trimming, which the boys and girls made. We brought flowers from the
+fence-thickets of the great field; and out of the disorder of flowers
+and provisions suddenly appeared as orderly a scheme for the feast
+as the marshal had shaped for the procession. I began to respect the
+Bowdens for their inheritance of good taste and skill and a certain
+pleasing gift of formality. Something made them do all these things in a
+finer way than most country people would have done them. As I looked up
+and down the tables there was a good cheer, a grave soberness that shone
+with pleasure, a humble dignity of bearing. There were some who should
+have sat below the salt for lack of this good breeding; but they were
+not many. So, I said to myself, their ancestors may have sat in the
+great hall of some old French house in the Middle Ages, when battles and
+sieges and processions and feasts were familiar things. The ministers
+and Mrs. Blackett, with a few of their rank and age, were put in places
+of honor, and for once that I looked any other way I looked twice
+at Mrs. Blackett's face, serene and mindful of privilege and
+responsibility, the mistress by simple fitness of this great day.
+
+Mrs. Todd looked up at the roof of green trees, and then carefully
+surveyed the company. “I see 'em better now they're all settin' down,”
+ she said with satisfaction. “There's old Mr. Gilbraith and his sister. I
+wish they were sittin' with us; they're not among folks they can parley
+with, an' they look disappointed.”
+
+As the feast went on, the spirits of my companion steadily rose. The
+excitement of an unexpectedly great occasion was a subtle stimulant
+to her disposition, and I could see that sometimes when Mrs. Todd had
+seemed limited and heavily domestic, she had simply grown sluggish for
+lack of proper surroundings. She was not so much reminiscent now as
+expectant, and as alert and gay as a girl. We who were her neighbors
+were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming
+countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at
+the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at
+the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused
+provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and
+more amazing to one's thought. More than one face among the Bowdens
+showed that only opportunity and stimulus were lacking,--a narrow set of
+circumstances had caged a fine able character and held it captive.
+One sees exactly the same types in a country gathering as in the most
+brilliant city company. You are safe to be understood if the spirit of
+your speech is the same for one neighbor as for the other.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. The Feast's End
+
+THE FEAST was a noble feast, as has already been said. There was an
+elegant ingenuity displayed in the form of pies which delighted my
+heart. Once acknowledge that an American pie is far to be preferred to
+its humble ancestor, the English tart, and it is joyful to be reassured
+at a Bowden reunion that invention has not yet failed. Beside a
+delightful variety of material, the decorations went beyond all my
+former experience; dates and names were wrought in lines of pastry and
+frosting on the tops. There was even more elaborate reading matter on an
+excellent early-apple pie which we began to share and eat, precept upon
+precept. Mrs. Todd helped me generously to the whole word BOWDEN, and
+consumed REUNION herself, save an undecipherable fragment; but the most
+renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden
+house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the
+right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. It must have
+been baked in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens, and
+fastened together on the morning of the day. There was a general sigh
+when this fell into ruin at the feast's end, and it was shared by a
+great part of the assembly, not without seriousness, and as if it were
+a pledge and token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread house,
+which had called up lively remembrances of a childish story. She had the
+gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look of high ideals.
+
+“I could just as well have made it all of frosted cake,” she said, “but
+'twouldn't have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe, was
+never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread would represent it
+best. It wasn't all I expected it would be,” she said sadly, as many an
+artist had said before her of his work.
+
+There were speeches by the ministers; and there proved to be a historian
+among the Bowdens, who gave some fine anecdotes of the family history;
+and then appeared a poetess, whom Mrs. Todd regarded with wistful
+compassion and indulgence, and when the long faded garland of verses
+came to an appealing end, she turned to me with words of praise.
+
+“Sounded pretty,” said the generous listener. “Yes, I thought she did
+very well. We went to school together, an' Mary Anna had a very hard
+time; trouble was, her mother thought she'd given birth to a genius,
+an' Mary Anna's come to believe it herself. There, I don't know what
+we should have done without her; there ain't nobody else that can write
+poetry between here and 'way up towards Rockland; it adds a great deal
+at such a time. When she speaks o' those that are gone, she feels it
+all, and so does everybody else, but she harps too much. I'd laid half
+of that away for next time, if I was Mary Anna. There comes mother to
+speak to her, an' old Mr. Gilbreath's sister; now she'll be heartened
+right up. Mother'll say just the right thing.”
+
+The leave-takings were as affecting as the meetings of these old friends
+had been. There were enough young persons at the reunion, but it is the
+old who really value such opportunities; as for the young, it is the
+habit of every day to meet their comrades,--the time of separation
+has not come. To see the joy with which these elder kinsfolk and
+acquaintances had looked in one another's faces, and the lingering touch
+of their friendly hands; to see these affectionate meetings and then the
+reluctant partings, gave one a new idea of the isolation in which it was
+possible to live in that after all thinly settled region. They did not
+expect to see one another again very soon; the steady, hard work on
+the farms, the difficulty of getting from place to place, especially in
+winter when boats were laid up, gave double value to any occasion which
+could bring a large number of families together. Even funerals in this
+country of the pointed firs were not without their social advantages
+and satisfactions. I heard the words “next summer” repeated many times,
+though summer was still ours and all the leaves were green.
+
+The boats began to put out from shore, and the wagons to drive away.
+Mrs. Blackett took me into the old house when we came back from the
+grove: it was her father's birthplace and early home, and she had spent
+much of her own childhood there with her grandmother. She spoke of those
+days as if they had but lately passed; in fact, I could imagine that
+the house looked almost exactly the same to her. I could see the brown
+rafters of the unfinished roof as I looked up the steep staircase,
+though the best room was as handsome with its good wainscoting and touch
+of ornament on the cornice as any old room of its day in a town.
+
+Some of the guests who came from a distance were still sitting in the
+best room when we went in to take leave of the master and mistress of
+the house. We all said eagerly what a pleasant day it had been, and
+how swiftly the time had passed. Perhaps it is the great national
+anniversaries which our country has lately kept, and the soldiers'
+meetings that take place everywhere, which have made reunions of every
+sort the fashion. This one, at least, had been very interesting. I
+fancied that old feuds had been overlooked, and the old saying that
+blood is thicker than water had again proved itself true, though from
+the variety of names one argued a certain adulteration of the Bowden
+traits and belongings. Clannishness is an instinct of the heart,--it is
+more than a birthright, or a custom; and lesser rights were forgotten in
+the claim to a common inheritance.
+
+We were among the very last to return to our proper lives and lodgings.
+I came near to feeling like a true Bowden, and parted from certain new
+friends as if they were old friends; we were rich with the treasure of a
+new remembrance.
+
+At last we were in the high wagon again; the old white horse had been
+well fed in the Bowden barn, and we drove away and soon began to climb
+the long hill toward the wooded ridge. The road was new to me, as roads
+always are, going back. Most of our companions had been full of anxious
+thoughts of home,--of the cows, or of young children likely to fall
+into disaster,--but we had no reasons for haste, and drove slowly along,
+talking and resting by the way. Mrs. Todd said once that she really
+hoped her front door had been shut on account of the dust blowing in,
+but added that nothing made any weight on her mind except not to forget
+to turn a few late mullein leaves that were drying on a newspaper in the
+little loft. Mrs. Blackett and I gave our word of honor that we would
+remind her of this heavy responsibility. The way seemed short, we had
+so much to talk about. We climbed hills where we could see the great
+bay and the islands, and then went down into shady valleys where the air
+began to feel like evening, cool and camp with a fragrance of wet ferns.
+Mrs. Todd alighted once or twice, refusing all assistance in securing
+some boughs of a rare shrub which she valued for its bark, though she
+proved incommunicative as to her reasons. We passed the house where we
+had been so kindly entertained with doughnuts earlier in the day, and
+found it closed and deserted, which was a disappointment.
+
+“They must have stopped to tea somewheres and thought they'd finish up
+the day,” said Mrs. Todd. “Those that enjoyed it best'll want to get
+right home so's to think it over.”
+
+“I didn't see the woman there after all, did you?” asked Mrs. Blackett
+as the horse stopped to drink at the trough.
+
+“Oh yes, I spoke with her,” answered Mrs. Todd, with but scant interest
+or approval. “She ain't a member o' our family.”
+
+“I thought you said she resembled Cousin Pa'lina Bowden about the
+forehead,” suggested Mrs. Blackett.
+
+“Well, she don't,” answered Mrs. Todd impatiently. “I ain't one that's
+ord'narily mistaken about family likenesses, and she didn't seem to meet
+with friends, so I went square up to her. 'I expect you're a Bowden by
+your looks,' says I. 'Yes, I can take it you're one o' the Bowdens.'
+'Lor', no,' says she. 'Dennett was my maiden name, but I married a
+Bowden for my first husband. I thought I'd come an' just see what was
+a-goin' on!”
+
+Mrs. Blackett laughed heartily. “I'm goin' to remember to tell William
+o' that,” she said. “There, Almiry, the only thing that's troubled me
+all this day is to think how William would have enjoyed it. I do so wish
+William had been there.”
+
+“I sort of wish he had, myself,” said Mrs. Todd frankly.
+
+“There wa'n't many old folks there, somehow,” said Mrs. Blackett, with
+a touch of sadness in her voice. “There ain't so many to come as there
+used to be, I'm aware, but I expected to see more.”
+
+“I thought they turned out pretty well, when you come to think of it;
+why, everybody was sayin' so an' feelin' gratified,” answered Mrs. Todd
+hastily with pleasing unconsciousness; then I saw the quick color flash
+into her cheek, and presently she made some excuse to turn and steal an
+anxious look at her mother. Mrs. Blackett was smiling and thinking about
+her happy day, though she began to look a little tired. Neither of my
+companions was troubled by her burden of years. I hoped in my heart that
+I might be like them as I lived on into age, and then smiled to think
+that I too was no longer very young. So we always keep the same hearts,
+though our outer framework fails and shows the touch of time.
+
+“'Twas pretty when they sang the hymn, wasn't it?” asked Mrs. Blackett
+at suppertime, with real enthusiasm. “There was such a plenty o' men's
+voices; where I sat it did sound beautiful. I had to stop and listen
+when they came to the last verse.”
+
+I saw that Mrs. Todd's broad shoulders began to shake. “There was good
+singers there; yes, there was excellent singers,” she agreed heartily,
+putting down her teacup, “but I chanced to drift alongside Mis' Peter
+Bowden o' Great Bay, an' I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out
+o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.”
+
+
+
+
+XX. Along Shore
+
+ONE DAY as I went along the shore beyond the old wharves and the newer,
+high-stepped fabric of the steamer landing, I saw that all the boats
+were beached, and the slack water period of the early afternoon
+prevailed. Nothing was going on, not even the most leisurely of
+occupations, like baiting trawls or mending nets, or repairing lobster
+pots; the very boats seemed to be taking an afternoon nap in the sun.
+I could hardly discover a distant sail as I looked seaward, except a
+weather-beaten lobster smack, which seemed to have been taken for a
+plaything by the light airs that blew about the bay. It drifted and
+turned about so aimlessly in the wide reach off Burnt Island, that I
+suspected there was nobody at the wheel, or that she might have parted
+her rusty anchor chain while all the crew were asleep.
+
+I watched her for a minute or two; she was the old Miranda, owned by
+some of the Caplins, and I knew her by an odd shaped patch of newish
+duck that was set into the peak of her dingy mainsail. Her vagaries
+offered such an exciting subject for conversation that my heart rejoiced
+at the sound of a hoarse voice behind me. At that moment, before I
+had time to answer, I saw something large and shapeless flung from the
+Miranda's deck that splashed the water high against her black side,
+and my companion gave a satisfied chuckle. The old lobster smack's sail
+caught the breeze again at this moment, and she moved off down the bay.
+Turning, I found old Elijah Tilley, who had come softly out of his dark
+fish-house, as if it were a burrow.
+
+“Boy got kind o' drowsy steerin' of her; Monroe he hove him right
+overboard; 'wake now fast enough,” explained Mr. Tilley, and we laughed
+together.
+
+I was delighted, for my part, that the vicissitudes and dangers of the
+Miranda, in a rocky channel, should have given me this opportunity to
+make acquaintance with an old fisherman to whom I had never spoken. At
+first he had seemed to be one of those evasive and uncomfortable persons
+who are so suspicious of you that they make you almost suspicious of
+yourself. Mr. Elijah Tilley appeared to regard a stranger with scornful
+indifference. You might see him standing on the pebble beach or in a
+fish-house doorway, but when you came nearer he was gone. He was one of
+the small company of elderly, gaunt-shaped great fisherman whom I used
+to like to see leading up a deep-laden boat by the head, as if it were
+a horse, from the water's edge to the steep slope of the pebble beach.
+There were four of these large old men at the Landing, who were the
+survivors of an earlier and more vigorous generation. There was an
+alliance and understanding between them, so close that it was apparently
+speechless. They gave much time to watching one another's boats go out
+or come in; they lent a ready hand at tending one another's lobster
+traps in rough weather; they helped to clean the fish or to sliver
+porgies for the trawls, as if they were in close partnership; and when
+a boat came in from deep-sea fishing they were never too far out of
+the way, and hastened to help carry it ashore, two by two, splashing
+alongside, or holding its steady head, as if it were a willful sea colt.
+As a matter of fact no boat could help being steady and way-wise under
+their instant direction and companionship. Abel's boat and Jonathan
+Bowden's boat were as distinct and experienced personalities as the men
+themselves, and as inexpressive. Arguments and opinions were unknown
+to the conversation of these ancient friends; you would as soon have
+expected to hear small talk in a company of elephants as to hear old Mr.
+Bowden or Elijah Tilley and their two mates waste breath upon any form
+of trivial gossip. They made brief statements to one another from time
+to time. As you came to know them you wondered more and more that
+they should talk at all. Speech seemed to be a light and elegant
+accomplishment, and their unexpected acquaintance with its arts made
+them of new value to the listener. You felt almost as if a landmark pine
+should suddenly address you in regard to the weather, or a lofty-minded
+old camel make a remark as you stood respectfully near him under the
+circus tent.
+
+I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these
+self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature
+and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics
+or theology. My friend, Captain Bowden, who was the nephew of the eldest
+of this group, regarded them with deference; but he did not belong to
+their secret companionship, though he was neither young nor talkative.
+
+“They've gone together ever since they were boys, they know most
+everything about the sea amon'st them,” he told me once. “They was
+always just as you see 'em now since the memory of man.”
+
+These ancient seafarers had houses and lands not outwardly different
+from other Dunnet Landing dwellings, and two of them were fathers of
+families, but their true dwelling places were the sea, and the stony
+beach that edged its familiar shore, and the fish-houses, where much
+salt brine from the mackerel kits had soaked the very timbers into a
+state of brown permanence and petrifaction. It had also affected the old
+fishermen's hard complexions, until one fancied that when Death claimed
+them it could only be with the aid, not of any slender modern dart, but
+the good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth century woodcut.
+
+Elijah Tilley was such an evasive, discouraged-looking person,
+heavy-headed, and stooping so that one could never look him in the
+face, that even after his friendly exclamation about Monroe Pennell, the
+lobster smack's skipper, and the sleepy boy, I did not venture at once
+to speak again. Mr. Tilley was carrying a small haddock in one hand, and
+presently shifted it to the other hand lest it might touch my skirt. I
+knew that my company was accepted, and we walked together a little way.
+
+“You mean to have a good supper,” I ventured to say, by way of
+friendliness.
+
+“Goin' to have this 'ere haddock an' some o' my good baked potatoes;
+must eat to live,” responded my companion with great pleasantness and
+open approval. I found that I had suddenly left the forbidding coast and
+come into the smooth little harbor of friendship.
+
+“You ain't never been up to my place,” said the old man. “Folks don't
+come now as they used to; no, 'tain't no use to ask folks now. My poor
+dear she was a great hand to draw young company.”
+
+I remembered that Mrs. Todd had once said that this old fisherman had
+been sore stricken and unconsoled at the death of his wife.
+
+“I should like very much to come,” said I. “Perhaps you are going to be
+at home later on?”
+
+Mr. Tilley agreed, by a sober nod, and went his way bent-shouldered and
+with a rolling gait. There was a new patch high on the shoulder of
+his old waistcoat, which corresponded to the renewing of the Miranda's
+mainsail down the bay, and I wondered if his own fingers, clumsy with
+much deep-sea fishing, had set it in.
+
+“Was there a good catch to-day?” I asked, stopping a moment. “I didn't
+happen to be on the shore when the boats came in.”
+
+“No; all come in pretty light,” answered Mr. Tilley. “Addicks an' Bowden
+they done the best; Abel an' me we had but a slim fare. We went out
+'arly, but not so 'arly as sometimes; looked like a poor mornin'. I got
+nine haddick, all small, and seven fish; the rest on 'em got more fish
+than haddick. Well, I don't expect they feel like bitin' every day; we
+l'arn to humor 'em a little, an' let 'em have their way 'bout it. These
+plaguey dog-fish kind of worry 'em.” Mr. Tilley pronounced the last
+sentence with much sympathy, as if he looked upon himself as a true
+friend of all the haddock and codfish that lived on the fishing grounds,
+and so we parted.
+
+
+Later in the afternoon I went along the beach again until I came to
+the foot of Mr. Tilley's land, and found his rough track across the
+cobblestones and rocks to the field edge, where there was a heavy piece
+of old wreck timber, like a ship's bone, full of tree-nails. From this a
+little footpath, narrow with one man's treading, led up across the small
+green field that made Mr. Tilley's whole estate, except a straggling
+pasture that tilted on edge up the steep hillside beyond the house and
+road. I could hear the tinkle-tankle of a cow-bell somewhere among the
+spruces by which the pasture was being walked over and forested from
+every side; it was likely to be called the wood lot before long, but the
+field was unmolested. I could not see a bush or a brier anywhere within
+its walls, and hardly a stray pebble showed itself. This was most
+surprising in that country of firm ledges, and scattered stones which
+all the walls that industry could devise had hardly begun to clear
+away off the land. In the narrow field I noticed some stout stakes,
+apparently planted at random in the grass and among the hills of
+potatoes, but carefully painted yellow and white to match the house, a
+neat sharp-edged little dwelling, which looked strangely modern for its
+owner. I should have much sooner believed that the smart young wholesale
+egg merchant of the Landing was its occupant than Mr. Tilley, since a
+man's house is really but his larger body, and expresses in a way his
+nature and character.
+
+I went up the field, following the smooth little path to the side door.
+As for using the front door, that was a matter of great ceremony; the
+long grass grew close against the high stone step, and a snowberry bush
+leaned over it, top-heavy with the weight of a morning-glory vine that
+had managed to take what the fishermen might call a half hitch about
+the door-knob. Elijah Tilley came to the side door to receive me; he was
+knitting a blue yarn stocking without looking on, and was warmly
+dressed for the season in a thick blue flannel shirt with white crockery
+buttons, a faded waistcoat and trousers heavily patched at the knees.
+These were not his fishing clothes. There was something delightful in
+the grasp of his hand, warm and clean, as if it never touched anything
+but the comfortable woolen yarn, instead of cold sea water and slippery
+fish.
+
+“What are the painted stakes for, down in the field?” I hastened to ask,
+and he came out a step or two along the path to see; and looked at the
+stakes as if his attention were called to them for the first time.
+
+“Folks laughed at me when I first bought this place an' come here to
+live,” he explained. “They said 'twa'n't no kind of a field privilege at
+all; no place to raise anything, all full o' stones. I was aware 'twas
+good land, an' I worked some on it--odd times when I didn't have nothin'
+else on hand--till I cleared them loose stones all out. You never see
+a prettier piece than 'tis now; now did ye? Well, as for them painted
+marks, them's my buoys. I struck on to some heavy rocks that didn't show
+none, but a plow'd be liable to ground on 'em, an' so I ketched holt
+an' buoyed 'em same's you see. They don't trouble me no more'n if they
+wa'n't there.”
+
+“You haven't been to sea for nothing,” I said laughing.
+
+“One trade helps another,” said Elijah with an amiable smile. “Come
+right in an' set down. Come in an' rest ye,” he exclaimed, and led the
+way into his comfortable kitchen. The sunshine poured in at the two
+further windows, and a cat was curled up sound asleep on the table that
+stood between them. There was a new-looking light oilcloth of a tiled
+pattern on the floor, and a crockery teapot, large for a household
+of only one person, stood on the bright stove. I ventured to say that
+somebody must be a very good housekeeper.
+
+“That's me,” acknowledged the old fisherman with frankness. “There ain't
+nobody here but me. I try to keep things looking right, same's poor dear
+left 'em. You set down here in this chair, then you can look off an' see
+the water. None on 'em thought I was goin' to get along alone, no way,
+but I wa'n't goin' to have my house turned upsi' down an' all changed
+about; no, not to please nobody. I was the only one knew just how she
+liked to have things set, poor dear, an' I said I was goin' to make
+shift, and I have made shift. I'd rather tough it out alone.” And he
+sighed heavily, as if to sigh were his familiar consolation.
+
+We were both silent for a minute; the old man looked out the window, as
+if he had forgotten I was there.
+
+“You must miss her very much?” I said at last.
+
+“I do miss her,” he answered, and sighed again. “Folks all kep'
+repeatin' that time would ease me, but I can't find it does. No, I miss
+her just the same every day.”
+
+“How long is it since she died?” I asked.
+
+“Eight year now, come the first of October. It don't seem near so long.
+I've got a sister that comes and stops 'long o' me a little spell,
+spring an' fall, an' odd times if I send after her. I ain't near so good
+a hand to sew as I be to knit, and she's very quick to set everything
+to rights. She's a married woman with a family; her son's folks lives
+at home, an' I can't make no great claim on her time. But it makes me
+a kind o' good excuse, when I do send, to help her a little; she ain't
+none too well off. Poor dear always liked her, and we used to contrive
+our ways together. 'Tis full as easy to be alone. I set here an'
+think it all over, an' think considerable when the weather's bad to go
+outside. I get so some days it feels as if poor dear might step right
+back into this kitchen. I keep a-watchin' them doors as if she might
+step in to ary one. Yes, ma'am, I keep a-lookin' off an' droppin' o' my
+stitches; that's just how it seems. I can't git over losin' of her no
+way nor no how. Yes, ma'am, that's just how it seems to me.”
+
+I did not say anything, and he did not look up.
+
+“I git feelin' so sometimes I have to lay everything by an' go out door.
+She was a sweet pretty creatur' long's she lived,” the old man added
+mournfully. “There's that little rockin' chair o' her'n, I set an'
+notice it an' think how strange 'tis a creatur' like her should be gone
+an' that chair be here right in its old place.”
+
+
+“I wish I had known her; Mrs. Todd told me about your wife one day,” I
+said.
+
+“You'd have liked to come and see her; all the folks did,” said poor
+Elijah. “She'd been so pleased to hear everything and see somebody new
+that took such an int'rest. She had a kind o' gift to make it pleasant
+for folks. I guess likely Almiry Todd told you she was a pretty woman,
+especially in her young days; late years, too, she kep' her looks and
+come to be so pleasant lookin'. There, 'tain't so much matter, I shall
+be done afore a great while. No; I sha'n't trouble the fish a great
+sight more.”
+
+The old widower sat with his head bowed over his knitting, as if he were
+hastily shortening the very thread of time. The minutes went slowly by.
+He stopped his work and clasped his hands firmly together. I saw he had
+forgotten his guest, and I kept the afternoon watch with him. At last he
+looked up as if but a moment had passed of his continual loneliness.
+
+“Yes, ma'am, I'm one that has seen trouble,” he said, and began to knit
+again.
+
+The visible tribute of his careful housekeeping, and the clean bright
+room which had once enshrined his wife, and now enshrined her memory,
+was very moving to me; he had no thought for any one else or for any
+other place. I began to see her myself in her home,--a delicate-looking,
+faded little woman, who leaned upon his rough strength and affectionate
+heart, who was always watching for his boat out of this very window, and
+who always opened the door and welcomed him when he came home.
+
+“I used to laugh at her, poor dear,” said Elijah, as if he read my
+thought. “I used to make light of her timid notions. She used to be
+fearful when I was out in bad weather or baffled about gittin' ashore.
+She used to say the time seemed long to her, but I've found out all
+about it now. I used to be dreadful thoughtless when I was a young man
+and the fish was bitin' well. I'd stay out late some o' them days, an'
+I expect she'd watch an' watch an' lose heart a-waitin'. My heart alive!
+what a supper she'd git, an' be right there watchin' from the door, with
+somethin' over her head if 'twas cold, waitin' to hear all about it as I
+come up the field. Lord, how I think o' all them little things!”
+
+“This was what she called the best room; in this way,” he said
+presently, laying his knitting on the table, and leading the way across
+the front entry and unlocking a door, which he threw open with an air
+of pride. The best room seemed to me a much sadder and more empty place
+than the kitchen; its conventionalities lacked the simple perfection of
+the humbler room and failed on the side of poor ambition; it was only
+when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for
+society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was
+interesting at all. I could imagine the great day of certain purchases,
+the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious
+woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be
+pleased, but at ease only when they were safe back in the sailboat
+again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money
+all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail. I looked at
+the unworn carpet, the glass vases on the mantelpiece with their prim
+bunches of bleached swamp grass and dusty marsh rosemary, and I could
+read the history of Mrs. Tilley's best room from its very beginning.
+
+“You see for yourself what beautiful rugs she could make; now I'm going
+to show you her best tea things she thought so much of,” said the master
+of the house, opening the door of a shallow cupboard. “That's real
+chiny, all of it on those two shelves,” he told me proudly. “I bought
+it all myself, when we was first married, in the port of Bordeaux. There
+never was one single piece of it broke until-- Well, I used to say,
+long as she lived, there never was a piece broke, but long at the last I
+noticed she'd look kind o' distressed, an' I thought 'twas 'count o' me
+boastin'. When they asked if they should use it when the folks was here
+to supper, time o' her funeral, I knew she'd want to have everything
+nice, and I said 'certain.' Some o' the women they come runnin' to me
+an' called me, while they was takin' of the chiny down, an' showed me
+there was one o' the cups broke an' the pieces wropped in paper and
+pushed way back here, corner o' the shelf. They didn't want me to go an'
+think they done it. Poor dear! I had to put right out o' the house when
+I see that. I knowed in one minute how 'twas. We'd got so used to sayin'
+'twas all there just's I fetched it home, an' so when she broke that cup
+somehow or 'nother she couldn't frame no words to come an' tell me. She
+couldn't think 'twould vex me, 'twas her own hurt pride. I guess there
+wa'n't no other secret ever lay between us.”
+
+The French cups with their gay sprigs of pink and blue, the best
+tumblers, an old flowered bowl and tea caddy, and a japanned waiter or
+two adorned the shelves. These, with a few daguerreotypes in a little
+square pile, had the closet to themselves, and I was conscious of much
+pleasure in seeing them. One is shown over many a house in these days
+where the interest may be more complex, but not more definite.
+
+“Those were her best things, poor dear,” said Elijah as he locked the
+door again. “She told me that last summer before she was taken away that
+she couldn't think o' anything more she wanted, there was everything in
+the house, an' all her rooms was furnished pretty. I was goin' over to
+the Port, an' inquired for errands. I used to ask her to say what she
+wanted, cost or no cost--she was a very reasonable woman, an' 'twas the
+place where she done all but her extra shopping. It kind o' chilled me
+up when she spoke so satisfied.”
+
+“You don't go out fishing after Christmas?” I asked, as we came back to
+the bright kitchen.
+
+“No; I take stiddy to my knitting after January sets in,” said the old
+seafarer. “'Tain't worth while, fish make off into deeper water an' you
+can't stand no such perishin' for the sake o' what you get. I leave out
+a few traps in sheltered coves an' do a little lobsterin' on fair days.
+The young fellows braves it out, some on 'em; but, for me, I lay in
+my winter's yarn an' set here where 'tis warm, an' knit an' take my
+comfort. Mother learnt me once when I was a lad; she was a beautiful
+knitter herself. I was laid up with a bad knee, an' she said 'twould
+take up my time an' help her; we was a large family. They'll buy all the
+folks can do down here to Addicks' store. They say our Dunnet stockin's
+is gettin' to be celebrated up to Boston,--good quality o' wool an'
+even knittin' or somethin'. I've always been called a pretty hand to do
+nettin', but seines is master cheap to what they used to be when they
+was all hand worked. I change off to nettin' long towards spring, and I
+piece up my trawls and lines and get my fishin' stuff to rights. Lobster
+pots they require attention, but I make 'em up in spring weather when
+it's warm there in the barn. No; I ain't one o' them that likes to set
+an' do nothin'.”
+
+“You see the rugs, poor dear did them; she wa'n't very partial to
+knittin',” old Elijah went on, after he had counted his stitches. “Our
+rugs is beginnin' to show wear, but I can't master none o' them womanish
+tricks. My sister, she tinkers 'em up. She said last time she was here
+that she guessed they'd last my time.”
+
+“The old ones are always the prettiest,” I said.
+
+“You ain't referrin' to the braided ones now?” answered Mr. Tilley. “You
+see ours is braided for the most part, an' their good looks is all in
+the beginnin'. Poor dear used to say they made an easier floor. I go
+shufflin' round the house same's if 'twas a bo't, and I always used to
+be stubbin' up the corners o' the hooked kind. Her an' me was always
+havin' our jokes together same's a boy an' girl. Outsiders never'd know
+nothin' about it to see us. She had nice manners with all, but to me
+there was nobody so entertainin'. She'd take off anybody's natural
+talk winter evenin's when we set here alone, so you'd think 'twas them
+a-speakin'. There, there!”
+
+I saw that he had dropped a stitch again, and was snarling the blue yarn
+round his clumsy fingers. He handled it and threw it off at arm's length
+as if it were a cod line; and frowned impatiently, but I saw a tear
+shining on his cheek.
+
+I said that I must be going, it was growing late, and asked if I might
+come again, and if he would take me out to the fishing grounds someday.
+
+“Yes, come any time you want to,” said my host, “'tain't so pleasant as
+when poor dear was here. Oh, I didn't want to lose her an' she didn't
+want to go, but it had to be. Such things ain't for us to say; there's
+no yes an' no to it.”
+
+“You find Almiry Todd one o' the best o' women?” said Mr. Tilley as we
+parted. He was standing in the doorway and I had started off down the
+narrow green field. “No, there ain't a better hearted woman in the State
+o' Maine. I've known her from a girl. She's had the best o' mothers. You
+tell her I'm liable to fetch her up a couple or three nice good mackerel
+early tomorrow,” he said. “Now don't let it slip your mind. Poor dear,
+she always thought a sight o' Almiry, and she used to remind me there
+was nobody to fish for her; but I don't rec'lect it as I ought to. I see
+you drop a line yourself very handy now an' then.”
+
+We laughed together like the best of friends, and I spoke again about
+the fishing grounds, and confessed that I had no fancy for a southerly
+breeze and a ground swell.
+
+“Nor me neither,” said the old fisherman. “Nobody likes 'em, say what
+they may. Poor dear was disobliged by the mere sight of a bo't. Almiry's
+got the best o' mothers, I expect you know; Mis' Blackett out to Green
+Island; and we was always plannin' to go out when summer come; but
+there, I couldn't pick no day's weather that seemed to suit her just
+right. I never set out to worry her neither, 'twa'n't no kind o' use;
+she was so pleasant we couldn't have no fret nor trouble. 'Twas never
+'you dear an' you darlin'' afore folks, an' 'you divil' behind the
+door!”
+
+As I looked back from the lower end of the field I saw him still
+standing, a lonely figure in the doorway. “Poor dear,” I repeated to
+myself half aloud; “I wonder where she is and what she knows of the
+little world she left. I wonder what she has been doing these eight
+years!”
+
+I gave the message about the mackerel to Mrs. Todd.
+
+“Been visitin' with 'Lijah?” she asked with interest. “I expect you had
+kind of a dull session; he ain't the talkin' kind; dwellin' so much long
+o' fish seems to make 'em lose the gift o' speech.” But when I told
+her that Mr. Tilley had been talking to me that day, she interrupted me
+quickly.
+
+“Then 'twas all about his wife, an' he can't say nothin' too pleasant
+neither. She was modest with strangers, but there ain't one o' her old
+friends can ever make up her loss. For me, I don't want to go there no
+more. There's some folks you miss and some folks you don't, when they're
+gone, but there ain't hardly a day I don't think o' dear Sarah Tilley.
+She was always right there; yes, you knew just where to find her like
+a plain flower. 'Lijah's worthy enough; I do esteem 'Lijah, but he's a
+ploddin' man.”
+
+
+
+
+XXI. The Backward View
+
+AT LAST IT WAS the time of late summer, when the house was cool and damp
+in the morning, and all the light seemed to come through green leaves;
+but at the first step out of doors the sunshine always laid a warm hand
+on my shoulder, and the clear, high sky seemed to lift quickly as I
+looked at it. There was no autumnal mist on the coast, nor any August
+fog; instead of these, the sea, the sky, all the long shore line and the
+inland hills, with every bush of bay and every fir-top, gained a deeper
+color and a sharper clearness. There was something shining in the air,
+and a kind of lustre on the water and the pasture grass,--a northern
+look that, except at this moment of the year, one must go far to seek.
+The sunshine of a northern summer was coming to its lovely end.
+
+The days were few then at Dunnet Landing, and I let each of them slip
+away unwillingly as a miser spends his coins. I wished to have one of
+my first weeks back again, with those long hours when nothing happened
+except the growth of herbs and the course of the sun. Once I had not
+even known where to go for a walk; now there were many delightful things
+to be done and done again, as if I were in London. I felt hurried and
+full of pleasant engagements, and the days flew by like a handful of
+flowers flung to the sea wind.
+
+At last I had to say good-by to all my Dunnet Landing friends, and my
+homelike place in the little house, and return to the world in which I
+feared to find myself a foreigner. There may be restrictions to such a
+summer's happiness, but the ease that belongs to simplicity is charming
+enough to make up for whatever a simple life may lack, and the gifts of
+peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.
+
+I was to take the small unpunctual steamer that went down the bay in the
+afternoon, and I sat for a while by my window looking out on the green
+herb garden, with regret for company. Mrs. Todd had hardly spoken all
+day except in the briefest and most disapproving way; it was as if we
+were on the edge of a quarrel. It seemed impossible to take my departure
+with anything like composure. At last I heard a footstep, and looked up
+to find that Mrs. Todd was standing at the door.
+
+“I've seen to everything now,” she told me in an unusually loud and
+business-like voice. “Your trunks are on the w'arf by this time. Cap'n
+Bowden he come and took 'em down himself, an' is going to see that
+they're safe aboard. Yes, I've seen to all your 'rangements,” she
+repeated in a gentler tone. “These things I've left on the kitchen table
+you'll want to carry by hand; the basket needn't be returned. I guess
+I shall walk over towards the Port now an' inquire how old Mis' Edward
+Caplin is.”
+
+I glanced at my friend's face, and saw a look that touched me to the
+heart. I had been sorry enough before to go away.
+
+“I guess you'll excuse me if I ain't down there to stand around on the
+w'arf and see you go,” she said, still trying to be gruff. “Yes, I ought
+to go over and inquire for Mis' Edward Caplin; it's her third shock, and
+if mother gets in on Sunday she'll want to know just how the old lady
+is.” With this last word Mrs. Todd turned and left me as if with sudden
+thought of something she had forgotten, so that I felt sure she was
+coming back, but presently I heard her go out of the kitchen door and
+walk down the path toward the gate. I could not part so; I ran after
+her to say good-by, but she shook her head and waved her hand without
+looking back when she heard my hurrying steps, and so went away down the
+street.
+
+When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my
+room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had
+died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back
+and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some
+chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
+
+I found the little packages on the kitchen table. There was a quaint
+West Indian basket which I knew its owner had valued, and which I had
+once admired; there was an affecting provision laid beside it for my
+seafaring supper, with a neatly tied bunch of southernwood and a twig of
+bay, and a little old leather box which held the coral pin that Nathan
+Todd brought home to give to poor Joanna.
+
+
+There was still an hour to wait, and I went up the hill just above the
+schoolhouse and sat there thinking of things, and looking off to sea,
+and watching for the boat to come in sight. I could see Green Island,
+small and darkly wooded at that distance; below me were the houses of
+the village with their apple-trees and bits of garden ground. Presently,
+as I looked at the pastures beyond, I caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Todd
+herself, walking slowly in the footpath that led along, following
+the shore toward the Port. At such a distance one can feel the large,
+positive qualities that control a character. Close at hand, Mrs.
+Todd seemed able and warm-hearted and quite absorbed in her bustling
+industries, but her distant figure looked mateless and appealing, with
+something about it that was strangely self-possessed and mysterious. Now
+and then she stooped to pick something,--it might have been her favorite
+pennyroyal,--and at last I lost sight of her as she slowly crossed an
+open space on one of the higher points of land, and disappeared again
+behind a dark clump of juniper and the pointed firs.
+
+As I came away on the little coastwise steamer, there was an old sea
+running which made the surf leap high on all the rocky shores. I stood
+on deck, looking back, and watched the busy gulls agree and turn, and
+sway together down the long slopes of air, then separate hastily and
+plunge into the waves. The tide was setting in, and plenty of small fish
+were coming with it, unconscious of the silver flashing of the great
+birds overhead and the quickness of their fierce beaks. The sea was
+full of life and spirit, the tops of the waves flew back as if they were
+winged like the gulls themselves, and like them had the freedom of the
+wind. Out in the main channel we passed a bent-shouldered old fisherman
+bound for the evening round among his lobster traps. He was toiling
+along with short oars, and the dory tossed and sank and tossed again
+with the steamer's waves. I saw that it was old Elijah Tilley, and
+though we had so long been strangers we had come to be warm friends, and
+I wished that he had waited for one of his mates, it was such hard work
+to row along shore through rough seas and tend the traps alone. As we
+passed I waved my hand and tried to call to him, and he looked up and
+answered my farewells by a solemn nod. The little town, with the tall
+masts of its disabled schooners in the inner bay, stood high above the
+flat sea for a few minutes then it sank back into the uniformity of the
+coast, and became indistinguishable from the other towns that looked as
+if they were crumbled on the furzy-green stoniness of the shore.
+
+The small outer islands of the bay were covered among the ledges with
+turf that looked as fresh as the early grass; there had been some days
+of rain the week before, and the darker green of the sweet-fern was
+scattered on all the pasture heights. It looked like the beginning of
+summer ashore, though the sheep, round and warm in their winter wool,
+betrayed the season of the year as they went feeding along the slopes
+in the low afternoon sunshine. Presently the wind began to blow and we
+struck out seaward to double the long sheltering headland of the cape,
+and when I looked back again, the islands and the headland had run
+together and Dunnet Landing and all its coasts were lost to sight.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by
+Sarah Orne Jewett
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