am only a simple sea-dog. I love the sea. Men say for sure it is in
my heart and my blood. I must live on the sea. When my hour comes
to die, I hope the sea will keep my body in one of her clean, cool
graves. If God gives me Nanna, and we have sons and daughters, they
shall have a happy childhood and a good schooling. Then I will put
all the boys in the boats, and the girls shall learn to grow like
their mother, and, if it please God, they shall marry good men and
good fishers."

"It seems to me that the life of a fisher is a very hard one, and
withal that it hath but small returns."

"Fishers have their good and their bad seasons. They take their
food direct from the hand of God; so, then, good or bad, it is all
right. Fishers have their loves and joys and sorrows; birth and
marriage and death come to them as to others. They have the same
share of God's love, the same Bible, the same hope of eternal life,
that the richest men and women have. It is enough."

"And hard lives have their compensations, David. Doubtless the
fisherman's life has its peculiar blessings?"

"It has. The fisher's life is as free from temptation as a life can
be. He _has_ to trust God a great deal; if he did not he would very
seldom go into the boats at all."

"Yet he holds the ocean 'in the hollow of his hand.'"

"That is true. I never feel so surely held in the hollow of his hand
as when the waves are as high as my masthead, and my boat smashes
into the black pit below. There is none but God then. Thank you,
Friend John, but I shall live and die a fisherman."

"Would thee care to change Shetland for some warmer and less stormy
climate?"

"Would a man care to change his own father and mother for any other
father and mother? Stern and hard was my poor father, and he knew not
how to love; but his memory is dear to me, and I would not break
the tie between us--no, not to be the son of a king! My native land
is a poor land, but I have thought of her green and purple moors
among gardens full of roses. Shetland is my _home_, and home is sweet
and fair and dear."

"Traveling Zionward, David, we have often to walk in the wilderness.
Thee hast dwelt in Skye and in Shetland; what other lands hast thee
seen?"

"I have been east as far as Smyrna. I sat there and read the message
of 'the First and the Last' to its church. And I went to Athens,
and stood where St. Paul had once stood. And I have seen Rome and
Naples and Genoa and Marseilles, a