the broad stretch of
land before them, and among their slowly gliding canvas scattered soft
touches of wandering light. Especially on the spritsail of the Rosalie,
whereunder was sitting, with the tiller in his hand and a very long pipe
in his mouth, Captain Zebedee Tugwell. His mighty legs were spread at
ease, his shoulders solid against a cask, his breast (like an elephant's
back in width, and bearing a bright blue crown tattooed) shone out of
the scarlet woolsey, whose plaits were filled with the golden shower of
a curly beard, untouched with gray. And his face was quite as worthy as
the substance leading up to it, being large and strengthful and slow to
move, though quick to make others do so. The forehead was heavy, and the
nose thickset, the lower jaw backed up the resolution of the other, and
the wide apart eyes, of a bright steel blue, were as steady as a brace
of pole-stars.

"What a wonderful man!" fair Dolly thought, as the great figure, looking
even grander in the glass, came rising upon a long slow wave--"what a
wonderful man that Tugwell is! So firmly resolved to have his own way,
so thoroughly dauntless, and such a grand beard! Ten times more like an
admiral than old Flapfin or my father is, if he only knew how to hold
his pipe. There is something about him so dignified, so calm, and so
majestic; but, for all that, I like the young man better. I have a great
mind to take half a peep at him; somebody might ask whether he was there
or not."

Being a young and bashful maid, as well as by birth a lady, she had
felt that it might be a very nice thing to contemplate sailors in the
distance, abstract sailors, old men who pulled ropes, or lounged on the
deck, if there was one. But to steal an unsuspected view at a young man
very well known to her, and acknowledged (not only by his mother
and himself, but also by every girl in the parish) as the Adonis of
Springhaven--this was a very different thing, and difficult to justify
even to one's self. The proper plan, therefore, was to do it, instead of
waiting to consider it.

"How very hard upon him it does seem," she whispered to herself, after a
good gaze at him, "that he must not even dream of having any hope of
me, because he has not happened to be born a gentleman! But he looks a
thousand times more like one than nine out of ten of the great gentlemen
I know--or at any rate he would if his mother didn't make his clothes."

For Zebedee Tugwell had a son called