usiness. He owned a fishing-smack, in which he labored
after the apostolic fashion; and she washed, and ironed, and scrubbed,
and brewed, and baked, in her contented round, week in and out. The only
recreation they ever enjoyed was the going once a week, in good weather,
to a prayer-meeting in a little old brown school-house, about a mile
from their dwelling; and making a weekly excursion every Sunday, in
their fishing craft, to the church opposite, on Harpswell Neck.

To be sure, Zephaniah had read many wide leaves of God's great book of
Nature, for, like most Maine sea-captains, he had been wherever ship can
go,--to all usual and unusual ports. His hard, shrewd, weather-beaten
visage had been seen looking over the railings of his brig in the port
of Genoa, swept round by its splendid crescent of palaces and its
snow-crested Apennines. It had looked out in the Lagoons of Venice at
that wavy floor which in evening seems a sea of glass mingled with fire,
and out of which rise temples, and palaces, and churches, and distant
silvery Alps, like so many fabrics of dreamland. He had been through the
Skagerrack and Cattegat,--into the Baltic, and away round to Archangel,
and there chewed a bit of chip, and considered and calculated what
bargains it was best to make. He had walked the streets of Calcutta in
his shirt-sleeves, with his best Sunday vest, backed with black glazed
cambric, which six months before came from the hands of Miss Roxy, and
was pronounced by her to be as good as any tailor could make; and in all
these places he was just Zephaniah Pennel,--a chip of old
Maine,--thrifty, careful, shrewd, honest, God-fearing, and carrying an
instinctive knowledge of men and things under a face of rustic
simplicity.

It was once, returning from one of his voyages, that he found his wife
with a black-eyed, curly-headed little creature, who called him papa,
and climbed on his knee, nestled under his coat, rifled his pockets, and
woke him every morning by pulling open his eyes with little fingers, and
jabbering unintelligible dialects in his ears.

"We will call this child Naomi, wife," he said, after consulting his old
Bible; "for that means pleasant, and I'm sure I never see anything beat
her for pleasantness. I never knew as children was so engagin'!"

It was to be remarked that Zephaniah after this made shorter and shorter
voyages, being somehow conscious of a string around his heart which
pulled him harder and harder, ti