ut he has that solemn, tender
way of preaching it as makes you feel he wouldn't have so much as a
chicken get there if he could help it,--"a lost soul," says the parson
(I don't know as I get the words exact),--"a soul that has gone and been
and got there of its own free will and choosing would be as like as not
to haul another soul alongside if he could. Then again, if the mate's
time had come, you see, and his chances were over, why, that's the will
of the Lord, and it's hell for him whichever side of death he is, and
nobody's fault but hisn; and the boy might be in the good place, and do
the errand all the same. That's just about it, Brown," says he. "A man
goes his own gait, and, if he won't go to heaven, he _won't_, and the
good God himself can't help it. He throws the shining gates all open
wide, and he never shut them on any poor fellow as would have entered
in, and he never, never will."

Which I thought was sensible of the parson, and very prettily put.

There's Molly frying flapjacks now, and flapjacks won't wait for no man,
you know, no more than time and tide, else I should have talked till
midnight, very like, to tell the time we made on that trip home, and
how green the harbor looked a sailing up, and of Molly and the baby
coming down to meet me in a little boat that danced about (for we cast a
little down the channel), and how she climbed up a laughing and a crying
all to once, about my neck, and how the boy had grown, and how when he
ran about the deck (the little shaver had his first pair of boots on
that very afternoon) I bethought me of the other time, and of Molly's
words, and of the lad we'd left behind us in the purple days.

Just as we were hauling up, I says to my wife: "Who's that old lady
setting there upon the lumber, with a gray bunnet, and a gray ribbon on
her cap?"

For there was an old lady there, and I saw the sun all about her, and
all on the blazing yellow boards, and I grew a little dazed and dazzled.

"I don't know," said Molly, catching onto me a little close. "She comes
there every day. They say she sits and watches for her lad as ran away."

So then I seemed to know, as well as ever I knew afterwards, who it was.
And I thought of the dog. And the green rocking-chair. And the book that
Whitmarsh wadded his old gun with. And the front-door, with the boy a
walking in.

So we three went up the wharf,--Molly and the baby and me,--and sat down
beside her on the yellow boards. I ca