ransparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh,
so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat
instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go
to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had
set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly
as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We
were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in
the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of
men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no
comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the
irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my
own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he
ended his tirade. "I did n't care nothing about you two," he said. "If
you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I
was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would
n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--" and he
laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.

But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. "I never see father so worried," she said,
"sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his
spy-glass; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he
did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he;
but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over
it." At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way,
and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort
of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived
over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his
way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he
followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms
project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the
shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and
State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nauti