public worship, and even to recall the text and
purport of the sermon. He was apt to fall asleep in his humble place
at the very back of the church, and his report of the services would
have puzzled a far less keen theologian than Miss Ann Ball. In fact
these poor makeshifts of religious interest did not deceive her, and
the captain had an uneasy consciousness that, to use his own
expression, the thicker he laid on the words, the quicker she saw
through them. And somehow or other that manly straightforwardness and
honesty of his, that free-handed generosity, that true unselfishness
which made him stick by his ship when the crew had run away from a
poor black cook who was taken down with the yellow-fever, which made
him nurse the frightened beggar as tenderly as a woman, and bring him
back to life, and send him packing afterward with plenty of money in
his pocket--all these fine traits that made Captain Ball respected in
every port where his loud voice and clumsy figure and bronzed face
were known, seemed to count for nothing with the stern sister. At
least her younger brother thought so. But when, a few years after he
came ashore for good, she died and left him alone in the neat old
white house, which his instinctive good taste and his father's before
him had made a museum of East Indian treasures, he found all his
letters stored away with loving care after they had been read and
reread into tatters, and among her papers such touching expressions of
love and pride and longing for his soul's good, that poor Captain
Asaph broke down altogether and cried like a school-boy. She had saved
every line of newspaper which even mentioned his ships' names. She had
loved him deeply in the repressed New England fashion, that under a
gray and forbidding crust of manner, like a chilled lava bed, hides
glowing fires of loyalty and devotion.

Sister Ann was a princess among housekeepers, and for some time after
her death the captain was a piteous mourner indeed. No growing
school-boy could be more shy and miserable in the presence of women
than he, though nobody had a readier friendliness or more off-hand
sailor ways among men. The few intimate family friends who came to his
assistance at the time of his sister's illness and death added untold
misery to the gloomy situation. Yet he received the minister with
outspoken gratitude in spite of that worthy man's trepidation.
Everybody said that poor Captain Ball looked as if his heart was