mast next day. Jist shows how safe them ar
little fishing craft is,--for all they look like an egg-shell on the
mighty deep, as Parson Sewell calls it."

"I was very much pleased with Mr. Sewell's exercise in prayer this
morning," said Mrs. Kittridge; "it must have been a comfort to you, Mis'
Pennel."

"It was, to be sure," said Mrs. Pennel.

"Puts me in mind of poor Mary Jane Simpson. Her husband went out, you
know, last June, and hain't been heard of since. Mary Jane don't really
know whether to put on mourning or not."

"Law! I don't think Mary Jane need give up yet," said the Captain.
"'Member one year I was out, we got blowed clear up to Baffin's Bay, and
got shut up in the ice, and had to go ashore and live jist as we could
among them Esquimaux. Didn't get home for a year. Old folks had clean
giv' us up. Don't need never despair of folks gone to sea, for they's
sure to turn up, first or last."

"But I hope," said Mara, apprehensively, "that grandpapa won't get blown
up to Baffin's Bay. I've seen that on his chart,--it's a good ways."

"And then there's them 'ere icebergs," said Mrs. Kittridge; "I'm always
'fraid of running into them in the fog."

"Law!" said Captain Kittridge, "I've met 'em bigger than all the
colleges up to Brunswick,--great white bears on 'em,--hungry as Time in
the Primer. Once we came kersmash on to one of 'em, and if the Flying
Betsey hadn't been made of whalebone and injer-rubber, she'd a-been
stove all to pieces. Them white bears, they was so hungry, that they
stood there with the water jist runnin' out of their chops in a perfect
stream."

"Oh, dear, dear," said Mara, with wide round eyes, "what will Moses do
if they get on the icebergs?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Kittridge, looking solemnly at the child through the
black bows of her spectacles, "we can truly say:--

"'Dangers stand thick through all the ground,
To push us to the tomb,'

as the hymn-book says."

The kind-hearted Captain, feeling the fluttering heart of little Mara,
and seeing the tears start in her eyes, addressed himself forthwith to
consolation. "Oh, never you mind, Mara," he said, "there won't nothing
hurt 'em. Look at me. Why, I've been everywhere on the face of the
earth. I've been on icebergs, and among white bears and Indians, and
seen storms that would blow the very hair off your head, and here I am,
dry and tight as ever. You'll see 'em back before long."

The cheerful laugh with which the Ca