a rambler rose draped
these pickets. The buds on the rose were bursting into crimson flower.

The house was four-square, plain, and without any ornamentation. It was
built about a great, square chimney that was like a spine. There were six
flues in this chimney, and a pot atop each flue. These little chimney
pots breaking the severe outlines of the house, gave the only suggestion
of lightness or frivolity about it. They were like the heads of impish
children, peeping over a fence....

Across the front of this house, on the second floor, ran a single, long
room like a corridor. Its windows looked down, across the town, to the
Harbor. A glass hung in brackets on the wall; there was a hog-yoke in its
case upon a little table, and a ship's chronometer, and a compass....
There were charts in a tin tube upon the wall, and one that showed the
Harbor and the channel to the sea hung between the middle windows. In the
north corner, a harpoon, and two lances, and a boat spade leaned. Their
blades were covered with wooden sheaths, painted gray. A fifteen-foot
jawbone, cleaned and polished and with every curving tooth in place, hung
upon the rear wall and gleamed like old and yellow ivory. The chair at
the table was fashioned of whalebone; and on a bracket above the table
rested the model of a whaling ship, not more than eighteen inches long,
fashioned of sperm ivory and perfect in every detail. Even the tiny
harpoons in the boats that hung along the rail were tipped with bits of
steel....

The windows of this place were tight closed; nevertheless, the room was
filled with the harsh, strong smell of the sea.

Joel Shore sat in the whalebone chair, at the table, reading a book. The
book was the Log of the House of Shore. Joel's father had begun it, when
Joel and his four brothers were ranging from babyhood through youth.... A
full half of the book was filled with entries in old Matthew Shore's
small, cramped hand. The last of these entries was very short. It began
with a date, and it read:

"Wind began light, from the south. This day came into Harbor the bark
_Winona_, after a cruise of three years, two months, and four days.
Captain Chase reported that my eldest son, Matthew Shore, was killed by
the fluke of a right whale, at Christmas Island. The whale yielded
seventy barrels of oil. Matthew Shore was second mate."

And below, upon a single line, like an epitaph, the words:

"'All the brothers were valiant