fter the usual totally unnecessary concern as to
rugs and either useless things, followed him and appeared to practice his
French on the sailor.

"That there Frenchy," Captain Sammy confided to me, "is most crazy over
th' young 'un. I never did see sich a thing in all me born days."

"He must be awfully proud of such a dear little son," I answered.

"There's them as says it ain't the son o' he," replied Sammy. "He don't
never talk about the bye. They says he jist picked him up somewheres,
jist some place or other. You would hardly think what a plenty they is as
have fathers or mothers neither, along th' coast."

This opened to me a vista of troops of kiddies wandering up and down the
cliffs, wailing the poor daddies that will never be given back by the
rough sea, and the mothers who found life harder than they could bear,
and it saddened me. You always said I must beware of my imagination,
but I think there was a funded reality in that vision. Then I was
compelled to look about me, for we were passing through headlands at the
narrow mouth of the cove, the long lift of the open sea bore us up and
down again, softly, like an easy low swing. That terrible reek of fish
had disappeared and the air was laden with the delightful pungency of
clean seaweed and the pure saltiness of the great waters. North and south
of us extended the rocky coastline all frilled, at the foot of the great
ledges, with the pearly spume of the long rollers.

It was very early when we arrived in the _Snowbird_, and I was not on
deck very long. It didn't seem nearly so beautiful then, and I had no
idea that it would be like this.

"It is perfectly marvelous," I told Captain Sammy. "But it is a terrible
coast. How do you ever manage to get back in storms and fogs? The mouth
of the cove is nothing but a tiny hole in the face of the cliffs."

"Times when they is nought but fog maybe we smells 'un," he replied, with
the most solemn gravity.

"I hadn't thought of such an obvious thing," I replied, laughing. "It
seems quite possible. But how about gales?"

"They is times when we has to run to some o' the bays north or south of
us fer shelter," he answered. "I've allers been able to fetch 'un."

"But what if you were carried out to sea?"

"Then likely I'd git ketched, like so many others has, ma'am."

And then, Aunt Jennie dear, in spite of the shining of the bright sun
upon the glittering water and the softness of the air that was caressing
my