Twice-told tales
eyes had been blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer
in its socket. Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to
tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates,
when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor’s
chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers, and
there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor
of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch
with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an
interminable winter at the Isle of Sables, where he had gladdened
himself amid polar snows with the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of
a West India schooner. And wrathfully did he shake his fist as he
related how a party of Cape Cod men had robbed him and his companions
of their lawful spoils and sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica,
leaving him not a drop to drown his sorrow. Villains they were, and of
that wicked brotherhood who are said to tie lanterns to horses’ tails
to mislead the mariner along the dangerous shores of the Cape.
Even now I seem to see the group of fishermen with that old salt in the
midst. One fellow sits on the counter, a second bestrides an
oil-barrel, a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod-lines,
and another has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a heap of
salt which will shortly be sprinkled over a lot of fish. They are a
likely set of men. Some have voyaged to the East Indies or the Pacific,
and most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners to Newfoundland; a
few have been no farther than the Middle Banks, and one or two have
always fished along the shore; but, as Uncle Parker used to say, they
have all been christened in salt water and know more than men ever
learn in the bushes. A curious figure, by way of contrast, is a
fish-dealer from far up-country listening with eyes wide open to
narratives that might startle Sinbad the Sailor.—Be it well with you,
my brethren! Ye are all gone—some to your graves ashore and others to
the depths of ocean—but my faith is strong that ye are happy; for
whenever I behold your forms, whether in dream or vision, each departed
friend is puffing his long nine, and a mug of the right blackstrap goes
round from lip to lip.
But where was the mermaid in those delightful times? At a certain
window near the centre of the village appeared a pretty display of
gingerbread men and horses, picture-books and ballads, small
fish-hooks, pins, needles, sugarplums and brass thimbles—articles on
which the young fishermen used to expend their money from pure
gallantry. What a picture was Susan behind the counter! A slender
maiden, though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest of all
waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a complexion rather pale
except when the sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles became
beauty-spots beneath her eyelids.—How was it, Susan, that you talked
and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was
right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked
a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence had you
that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought gayety,
quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your sunshine
and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. She made you a
frank, simple, kind-hearted, sensible and mirthful girl. Obeying
Nature, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed a maiden’s
thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent as naked Eve.—It
was beautiful to observe how her simple and happy nature mingled itself
with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within my heart and took up her
dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome cavern hung round with
glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth of feeling, while the
influence of my mind made her contemplative. I taught her to love the
moonlight hour, when the expanse of the encircled bay was smooth as a
great mirror and slept in a transparent shadow, while beyond Nahant the
wind rippled the dim ocean into a dreamy brightness which grew faint
afar off without becoming gloomier. I held her hand and pointed to the
long surf-wave as it rolled calmly on the beach in an unbroken line of
silver; we were silent together till its deep and peaceful murmur had
swept by us. When the Sabbath sun shone down into the recesses of the
cliffs, I led the mermaid thither and told her that those huge gray,
shattered rocks, and her native sea that raged for ever like a storm
against them, and her own slender beauty in so stern a scene, were all
combined into a strain of poetry. But on the Sabbath-eve, when her
mother had gone early to bed and her gentle sister had smiled and left
us, as we sat alone by the quiet hearth with household things around,
it was her turn to make me feel that here was a deeper poetry, and that
this was the dearest hour of all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had
shot wild-fowl enough to feather our bridal-bed, and the daughter of
the sea was mine.
I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic arch by setting up a whale’s jaw-bones. We bought a heifer
with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supply
us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small and
neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and with
shells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea’s
treasury of such things on Nahant Beach. On the desk, beneath the
looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at the
book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her evening
psalm. Except the almanac, we had no other literature. All that I heard
of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck was sold by a
pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in the village, and
read through its owner’s nose to a slumbrous auditory.
Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human
erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and
solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of sand
might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England. In
truth, I dreaded him.—When our children were old enough to claim his
care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased at
this learned man’s encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to trust
them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure. But I
loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and point to
nature in the vast and the minute—the sky, the sea, the green earth,
the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of the mighty works
and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple wisdom of a man
whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep and his heart by
the strong and pure affections of his evening home. Sometimes my voice
lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt his eye upon me as I
spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us were gazing at ourselves in
the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I pointed to the
pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion was strewn
everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of water recalled the
idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for ever with our
children. Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the little faces made up
of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around me, leaving a
pale visage like my own of former days within the frame of a large
looking-glass. Strange illusion!
My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and
absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. My
manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest without
having known the weariness of later age; and now with a wrinkled
forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have become the
patriarch—the uncle—of the village. I love that name: it widens the
circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my household in
the kindred of affection.
Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock
full forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the
gunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where the warmth
is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth when a friend or two are
there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a broken
voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be praised! is the
vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage, and traditions
ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself or others hitherto
effaced by things more recent, acquire new distinctness in my memory. I
remember the happy days when the haddock were more numerous on all the
fishing-grounds than sculpins in the surf—when the deep-water cod swam
close in-shore, and the dogfish, with his poisonous horn, had not
learnt to take the hook. I can number every equinoctial storm in which
the sea has overwhelmed the street, flooded the cellars of the village
and hissed upon our kitchen hearth. I give the history of the great
whale that was landed on Whale Beach, and whose jaws, being now my
gateway, will last for ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath
them. Thence it is an easy digression to the halibut—scarcely smaller
than the whale—which ran out six codlines and hauled my dory to the
mouth of Boston harbor before I could touch him with the gaff.
If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how a
friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and the
sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine
days missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on
Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride,
as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was. With
such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows! Another
favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had
the gift of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and pitied, though
she went from door to door accusing us of sin, exhorting to repentance
and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake. If the young
men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak of
pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste, and
could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount
Desert guided only by the rote of the shore—the peculiar sound of the
surf on each island, beach and line of rocks along the coast. Thus do I
talk, and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it pastime.
I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age. It
is like the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley where late in the
autumn the grass is greener than in August, and intermixed with golden
dandelions that had not been seen till now since the first warmth of
the year. But with me the verdure and the flowers are not frost-bitten
in the midst of winter. A playfulness has revisited my mind—a sympathy
with the young and gay, an unpainful interest in the business of
others, a light and wandering curiosity—arising, perhaps, from the
sense that my toil on earth is ended and the brief hour till bedtime
may be spent in play. Still, I have fancied that there is a depth of
feeling and reflection under this superficial levity peculiar to one
who has lived long and is soon to die.
Show me anything that would make an infant smile, and you shall behold
a gleam of mirth over the hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend a
pleasant hour in the sun watching the sports of the village children on
the edge of the surf. Now they chase the retreating wave far down over