where flower-frames should be put, to take
the sun. Then, going out of doors, they inspected the revolving
clothes-dryer, which David, with a seaman's instinct, had already rigged
with four little sloops to sail about on the ends of the projecting
arms, on Mondays, tacking after shirts and stockings. Then they went
to the barn, and David showed how he was going to cover the sides with
spruce shingles, so that he could have a warm place to work in in the
winter. Then they went over the fields, and planned a garden for the
next spring; and then they went down to the shore, and, where a little
arm of the sea made in, David showed where he would haul up his dory,
and would keep his boat, when he could afford to get one together: in
the mean time he was going to fish on shares with Jacob Foster, who
lived a few rods up the road. Then they all strolled back to the house,
and dined on shore-birds shot on Saturday afternoon, and new potatoes
and turnips which Jacob Foster had brought in.

After dinner, they all sat at the front windows, in the room which they
were pleased to call the parlor, David holding on his knees the two
oldest boys, delighted with the recovery of such a Sindbad of a father,
while the third, still a little shy of him, stood by his mother. David
told of the voyage, repeating, by request, full half-a-dozen times, the
story of the night when he was snapped off the end of the jib-boom;
to do which he had to set the boys down and stand, to make the swift,
sudden clutch, with his eyes shut, at the towing rope; at which the boys
screamed on every repetition.

After supper, David and his wife, leaving the children with orders to go
to bed at the first flash from the Windmill, went to church.

They took the same back seat which they had the night that David
shipped. There was much the same scene before them. There was
bald-headed Deacon Luce, in his usual Damocles' seat exactly beneath the
dangling chandelier, which children watched in morbid hope of a horror;
there was the president of the Dorcas Society, a gray-haired woman who
had navigated home a full-rigged ship from the Gold Coast; there were
grave-faced men who, among them, could have charted half the globe. In
the pulpit was the same old-fashioned, bookish man, who, having led
his college class, had passed his life in this unknown parish, lost
in delight, in his study, in the great Athenian's handling of the
presumptuous Glaucon, or simply unfolding parab