saving life, but was so
silent that his wife never knew it till he was near eighty, and then from
the chance visit of some old sailor. She asked him if it was true and he
said it was true, but she knew him too well to question and his old
shipmate had left the town. She too had the habit of fear. We knew that he
had been in many parts of the world, for there was a great scar on his
hand made by a whaling-hook, and in the dining-room was a cabinet with
bits of coral in it and a jar of water from the Jordan for the baptising
of his children and Chinese pictures upon rice-paper and an ivory
walking-stick from India that came to me after his death. He had great
physical strength and had the reputation of never ordering a man to do
anything he would not do himself. He owned many sailing ships and once,
when a captain just come to anchor at Rosses Point reported something
wrong with the rudder, had sent a messenger to say "send a man down to
find out what's wrong." "The crew all refuse" was the answer. "Go down
yourself" was my grandfather's order, and when that was not obeyed, he
dived from the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined along the pebbles
of the shore. He came up with his skin torn but well informed about the
rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a hatchet at his bedside for
burglars and would knock a man down instead of going to law, and I once
saw him hunt a group of men with a horsewhip. He had no relation for he
was an only child, and being solitary and silent, he had few friends. He
corresponded with Campbell of Islay who had befriended him and his crew
after a shipwreck, and Captain Webb, the first man who had swum the
Channel and who was drowned swimming the Niagara Rapids, had been a mate
in his employ and became a close friend. That is all the friends I can
remember and yet he was so looked up to and admired that when he returned
from taking the waters at Bath his men would light bonfires along the
railway line for miles, while his partner William Middleton whose father
after the great famine had attended the sick for weeks, and taken cholera
from a man he carried in his arms into his own house and died of it, and
was himself civil to everybody and a cleverer man than my grandfather,
came and went without notice. I think I confused my grandfather with God,
for I remember in one of my attacks of melancholy praying that he might
punish me for my sins, and I was shocked and astonished when a daring
little