The Country of

the Pointed Firs

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

1896

Contents

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I The Return

II Mrs. Todd

III The Schoolhouse

IV At the Schoolhouse Window

V Captain Littlepage

VI The Waiting Place

VII The Outer Island

VIII Green Island

IX William

X Where Pennyroyal Grew

XI The Old Singers

XII A Strange Sail

XIII Poor Joanna

XIV The Hermitage

XV On Shell-heap Island

XVI The Great Expedition

XVII A Country Road

XVIII The Bowden Reunion

XIX The Feast's End

XX Along Shore

XXI The Backward View

I

The Return

THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it

seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine.

Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that

neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to

the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to

be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the

Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and

there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of

garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their

steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the

far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and

its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows

a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming

acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at

first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the

growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in

the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned

to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same

quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all

that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the

centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.

One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat

wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators,

and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued

excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-

clapboarded little town.

II

Mrs. Todd

LATER, THERE WAS only one fault to find with this choice of a

summer lodging-place, and that was its complete lack of seclusion.

At first the tiny house of Mrs. Almira Todd, which stood with its

end to the street, appeared to be retired and sheltered enough from

the busy world, behind its bushy bit of a green garden, in which

all the blooming things, two or three gay hollyhocks and some

London-pride, were pushed back against the gray-shingled wall. It

was a queer little garden and puzzling to a stranger, the few

flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the

discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of

herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low

end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-

mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and

southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far

corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its

fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large

person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk

that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping

about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and

learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in

exactly which corner of the garden she might be.

At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic

pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner

herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim

sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of

these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have

had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but

now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals

with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs.

Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors,

who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own

ancient-looking vials to be filled. One nostrum was called the

Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen cents; the whispered

directions could be heard as customers passed the windows. With

most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart unadmonished from

the kitchen, Mrs. Todd being a wise saver of steps; but with

certain vials she gave cautions, standing in the doorway, and

there were other doses which had to be accompanied on their healing

way as far as the gate, while she muttered long chapters of

directions, and kept up an air of secrecy and importance to the

last. It may not have been only the common aids of humanity with

which she tried to cope; it seemed sometimes as if love and hate

and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper

remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd's

garden.

The village doctor and this learned herbalist were upon the

best of terms. The good man may have counted upon the unfavorable

effect of certain potions which he should find his opportunity in

counteracting; at any rate, he now and then stopped and exchanged

greetings with Mrs. Todd over the picket fence. The conversation

became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and

he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and

make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent

course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such

firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and usefulness of

worthy neighbors.

To arrive at this quietest of seaside villages late in June,

when the busy herb-gathering season was just beginning, was also to

arrive in the early prime of Mrs. Todd's activity in the brewing of

old-fashioned spruce beer. This cooling and refreshing drink had

been brought to wonderful perfection through a long series of

experiments; it had won immense local fame, and the supplies for

its manufacture were always giving out and having to be

replenished. For various reasons, the seclusion and uninterrupted

days which had been looked forward to proved to be very rare in

this otherwise delightful corner of the world. My hostess and I

had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a simple

cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of hot

suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen

hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand.

It was soon found that this arrangement made large allowance for

Mrs. Todd's slow herb-gathering progresses through woods and

pastures. The spruce-beer customers were pretty steady in hot

weather, and there were many demands for different soothing syrups

and elixirs with which the unwise curiosity of my early residence

had made me acquainted. Knowing Mrs. Todd to be a widow, who had

little beside this slender business and the income from one hungry

lodger to maintain her, one's energies and even interest were

quickly bestowed, until it became a matter of course that she

should go afield every pleasant day, and that the lodger should

answer all peremptory knocks at the side door.

In taking an occasional wisdom-giving stroll in Mrs. Todd's

company, and in acting as business partner during her

frequent absences, I found the July days fly fast, and it was not

until I felt myself confronted with too great pride and pleasure in

the display, one night, of two dollars and twenty-seven cents which

I had taken in during the day, that I remembered a long piece of

writing, sadly belated now, which I was bound to do. To have been

patted kindly on the shoulder and called "darlin'," to have been

offered a surprise of early mushrooms for supper, to have had all

the glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven cents in a single

day, and then to renounce it all and withdraw from these pleasant

successes, needed much resolution. Literary employments are so

vexed with uncertainties at best, and it was not until the voice of

conscience sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest

pebble beach that I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd.

She only became more wistfully affectionate than ever in her

expressions, and looked as disappointed as I expected when I

frankly told her that I could no longer enjoy the pleasure of what

we called "seein' folks." I felt that I was cruel to a whole

neighborhood in curtailing her liberty in this most important

season for harvesting the different wild herbs that were so much

counted upon to ease their winter ails.

"Well, dear," she said sorrowfully, "I've took great advantage

o' your bein' here. I ain't had such a season for years, but I

have never had nobody I could so trust. All you lack is a few

qualities, but with time you'd gain judgment an' experience, an' be

very able in the business. I'd stand right here an' say it to

anybody."

Mrs. Todd and I were not separated or estranged by the change

in our business relations; on the contrary, a deeper intimacy

seemed to begin. I do not know what herb of the night it was that

used sometimes to send out a penetrating odor late in the evening,

after the dew had fallen, and the moon was high, and the cool air

came up from the sea. Then Mrs. Todd would feel that she must talk

to somebody, and I was only too glad to listen. We both fell under

the spell, and she either stood outside the window, or made an

errand to my sitting-room, and told, it might be very commonplace

news of the day, or, as happened one misty summer night, all that

lay deepest in her heart. It was in this way that I came to know

that she had loved one who was far above her.

"No, dear, him I speak of could never think of me," she said.

"When we was young together his mother didn't favor the match, an'

done everything she could to part us; and folks thought we both

married well, but't wa'n't what either one of us wanted most; an'

now we're left alone again, an' might have had each other all the

time. He was above bein' a seafarin' man, an' prospered more

than most; he come of a high family, an' my lot was plain an' hard-

workin'. I ain't seen him for some years; he's forgot our youthful

feelin's, I expect, but a woman's heart is different; them feelin's

comes back when you think you've done with 'em, as sure as spring

comes with the year. An' I've always had ways of hearin' about

him."

She stood in the centre of a braided rug, and its rings of

black and gray seemed to circle about her feet in the dim light.

Her height and massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a

huge sibyl, while the strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew

in from the little garden.

III

The Schoolhouse

FOR SOME DAYS after this, Mrs. Todd's customers came and went past

my windows, and, haying-time being nearly over, strangers began to

arrive from the inland country, such was her widespread reputation.

Sometimes I saw a pale young creature like a white windflower left

over into midsummer, upon whose face consumption had set its bright

and wistful mark; but oftener two stout, hard-worked women from the

farms came together, and detailed their symptoms to Mrs. Todd in

loud and cheerful voices, combining the satisfactions of a friendly

gossip with the medical opportunity. They seemed to give much from

their own store of therapeutic learning. I became aware of the

school in which my landlady had strengthened her natural gift; but

hers was always the governing mind, and the final command, "Take of

hy'sop one handful" (or whatever herb it was), was received in

respectful silence. One afternoon, when I had listened,--it was

impossible not to listen, with cottonless ears,--and then laughed

and listened again, with an idle pen in my hand, during a

particularly spirited and personal conversation, I reached for my

hat, and, taking blotting-book and all under my arm, I resolutely

fled further temptation, and walked out past the fragrant green

garden and up the dusty road. The way went straight uphill, and

presently I stopped and turned to look back.

The tide was in, the wide harbor was surrounded by its dark

woods, and the small wooden houses stood as near as they could get

to the landing. Mrs. Todd's was the last house on the way

inland. The gray ledges of the rocky shore were well covered with

sod in most places, and the pasture bayberry and wild roses grew

thick among them. I could see the higher inland country and the

scattered farms. On the brink of the hill stood a little white

schoolhouse, much wind-blown and weather-beaten, which was a

landmark to seagoing folk; from its door there was a most beautiful

view of sea and shore. The summer vacation now prevailed, and

after finding the door unfastened, and taking a long look through

one of the seaward windows, and reflecting afterward for some time

in a shady place near by among the bayberry bushes, I returned to

the chief place of business in the village, and, to the amusement

of two of the selectmen, brothers and autocrats of Dunnet Landing,

I hired the schoolhouse for the rest of the vacation for fifty

cents a week.

Selfish as it may appear, the retired situation seemed to

possess great advantages, and I spent many days there quite

undisturbed, with the sea-breeze blowing through the small, high

windows and swaying the heavy outside shutters to and fro. I hung

my hat and luncheon-basket on an entry nail as if I were a small

scholar, but I sat at the teacher's desk as if I were that great

authority, with all the timid empty benches in rows before me. Now

and then an idle sheep came and stood for a long time looking in at

the door. At sundown I went back, feeling most businesslike, down

toward the village again, and usually met the flavor, not of the

herb garden, but of Mrs. Todd's hot supper, halfway up the hill.

On the nights when there were evening meetings or other public

exercises that demanded her presence we had tea very early, and I

was welcomed back as if from a long absence.

Once or twice I feigned excuses for staying at home, while

Mrs. Todd made distant excursions, and came home late, with both

hands full and a heavily laden apron. This was in pennyroyal time,

and when the rare lobelia was in its prime and the elecampane was

coming on. One day she appeared at the schoolhouse itself, partly

out of amused curiosity about my industries; but she explained that

there was no tansy in the neighborhood with such snap to it as some

that grew about the schoolhouse lot. Being scuffed down all the

spring made it grow so much the better, like some folks that had it

hard in their youth, and were bound to make the most of themselves

before they died.

IV

At the Schoolhouse Window

ONE DAY I reached the schoolhouse very late, owing to attendance

upon the funeral of an acquaintance and neighbor, with whose sad

decline in health I had been familiar, and whose last days both the

doctor and Mrs. Todd had tried in vain to ease. The services had

taken place at one o'clock, and now, at quarter past two, I stood

at the schoolhouse window, looking down at the procession as it

went along the lower road close to the shore. It was a walking

funeral, and even at that distance I could recognize most of the

mourners as they went their solemn way. Mrs. Begg had been very

much respected, and there was a large company of friends following

to her grave. She had been brought up on one of the neighboring

farms, and each of the few times that I had seen her she professed

great dissatisfaction with town life. The people lived too close

together for her liking, at the Landing, and she could not get used

to the constant sound of the sea. She had lived to lament three

seafaring husbands, and her house was decorated with West Indian

curiosities, specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they

had brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs.

Todd had told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls

together, and, to use her own phrase, had "both seen trouble till

they knew the best and worst on 't." I could see the sorrowful,

large figure of Mrs. Todd as I stood at the window. She made a

break in the procession by walking slowly and keeping the after-

part of it back. She held a handkerchief to her eyes, and I knew,

with a pang of sympathy, that hers was not affected grief.

Beside her, after much difficulty, I recognized the one

strange and unrelated person in all the company, an old man who had

always been mysterious to me. I could see his thin, bending

figure. He wore a narrow, long-tailed coat and walked with a

stick, and had the same "cant to leeward" as the wind-bent trees on

the height above.

This was Captain Littlepage, whom I had seen only once or

twice before, sitting pale and old behind a closed window; never

out of doors until now. Mrs. Todd always shook her head gravely

when I asked a question, and said that he wasn't what he had been

once, and seemed to class him with her other secrets. He might

have belonged with a simple which grew in a certain slug-haunted

corner of the garden, whose use she could never be betrayed

into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops by moonlight

once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the great

fading bloodroot leaves.

I could see that she was trying to keep pace with the old

captain's lighter steps. He looked like an aged grasshopper of

some strange human variety. Behind this pair was a short,

impatient, little person, who kept the captain's house, and gave it

what Mrs. Todd and others believed to be no proper sort of care.

She was usually called "that Mari' Harris" in subdued conversation

between intimates, but they treated her with anxious civility when

they met her face to face.

The bay-sheltered islands and the great sea beyond stretched

away to the far horizon southward and eastward; the little

procession in the foreground looked futile and helpless on the edge

of the rocky shore. It was a glorious day early in July, with a

clear, high sky; there were no clouds, there was no noise of the

sea. The song sparrows sang and sang, as if with joyous knowledge

of immortality, and contempt for those who could so pettily concern

themselves with death. I stood watching until the funeral

procession had crept round a shoulder of the slope below and

disappeared from the great landscape as if it had gone into a cave.

An hour later I was busy at my work. Now and then a bee

blundered in and took me for an enemy; but there was a useful stick

upon the teacher's desk, and I rapped to call the bees to order as

if they were unruly scholars, or waved them away from their riots

over the ink, which I had bought at the Landing store, and

discovered to be scented with bergamot, as if to refresh the labors

of anxious scribes. One anxious scribe felt very dull that day; a

sheep-bell tinkled near by, and called her wandering wits after it.

The sentences failed to catch these lovely summer cadences. For

the first time I began to wish for a companion and for news from

the outer world, which had been, half unconsciously, forgotten.

Watching the funeral gave one a sort of pain. I began to wonder if

I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying away

at the end of the services. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on

for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but

I had now made myself and my friends remember that I did not really

belong to Dunnet Landing.

I sighed, and turned to the half-written page again.

V

Captain Littlepage

IT WAS A long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast

town where nothing stole away the shortest minute. I had lost

myself completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside. There

was a steep footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I

climbed to shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I

believed that Mrs. Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had

occasion to seek me in great haste. I wrote on, feeling like a

besieged miser of time, while the footsteps came nearer, and the

sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as if someone had shaken a stick

in its wearer's face. Then I looked, and saw Captain Littlepage

passing the nearest window; the next moment he tapped politely at

the door.

"Come in, sir," I said, rising to meet him; and he entered,

bowing with much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and

offered him a chair by the window, where he seated himself at once,

being sadly spent by his climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind

the teacher's desk, which gave him the lower place of a scholar.

"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," I

said.

"A happy, rural seat of various views,"

he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded

shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased

as a child.

"My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems,

I suppose you know?" and I nodded. "There's nothing that ranks, to

my mind, with Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty," he

continued. "Shakespeare was a great poet; he copied life, but you

have to put up with a great deal of low talk."

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that

Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she

had also made dark reference to his having "spells" of some

unexplainable nature. I could not help wondering what errand had

brought him out in search of me. There was something quite

charming in his appearance: it was a face thin and delicate with

refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered

from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his

careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing

care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari'

Harris to be a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have

no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own

attentive valet. He sat looking at me expectantly. I could not

help thinking that, with his queer head and length of thinness, he

was made to hop along the road of life rather than to walk. The

captain was very grave indeed, and I bade my inward spirit keep

close to discretion.

"Poor Mrs. Begg has gone," I ventured to say. I still wore my

Sunday gown by way of showing respect.

"She has gone," said the captain,--"very easy at the last, I

was informed; she slipped away as if she were glad of the

opportunity."

I thought of the Countess of Carberry, and felt that history

repeated itself.

"She was one of the old stock," continued Captain Littlepage,

with touching sincerity. "She was very much looked up to in this

town, and will be missed."

I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line

of ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command

which are the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New

England. But as Darwin says in his autobiography, "there is no

such king as a sea-captain; he is greater even than a king or a

schoolmaster!"

Captain Littlepage moved his chair out of the wake of the

sunshine, and still sat looking at me. I began to be very eager to

know upon what errand he had come.

"It may be found out some o' these days," he said earnestly.

"We may know it all, the next step; where Mrs. Begg is now, for

instance. Certainty, not conjecture, is what we all desire."

"I suppose we shall know it all some day," said I.

"We shall know it while yet below," insisted the captain, with

a flush of impatience on his thin cheeks. "We have not looked for

truth in the right direction. I know what I speak of; those who

have laughed at me little know how much reason my ideas are based

upon." He waved his hand toward the village below. "In that

handful of houses they fancy that they comprehend the universe."

I smiled, and waited for him to go on.

"I am an old man, as you can see," he continued, "and I have

been a shipmaster the greater part of my life,--forty-three years

in all. You may not think it, but I am above eighty years of age."

He did not look so old, and I hastened to say so.

"You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then,

Captain Littlepage?" I said.

"I should have been serviceable at least five or six years

more," he answered. "My acquaintance with certain--my experience

upon a certain occasion, I might say, gave rise to prejudice. I do

not mind telling you that I chanced to learn of one of the greatest

discoveries that man has ever made."

Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense

of his sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and

I asked to hear more with all the deference I really felt. A

swallow flew into the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird

were after it, and beat itself against the walls for a minute, and

escaped again to the open air; but Captain Littlepage took no

notice whatever of the flurry.

"I had a valuable cargo of general merchandise from the London

docks to Fort Churchill, a station of the old company on Hudson's

Bay," said the captain earnestly. "We were delayed in lading, and

baffled by head winds and a heavy tumbling sea all the way north-

about and across. Then the fog kept us off the coast; and when I

made port at last, it was too late to delay in those northern

waters with such a vessel and such a crew as I had. They cared for

nothing, and idled me into a fit of sickness; but my first mate was

a good, excellent man, with no more idea of being frozen in there

until spring than I had, so we made what speed we could to get

clear of Hudson's Bay and off the coast. I owned an eighth of the

vessel, and he owned a sixteenth of her. She was a full-rigged

ship, called the Minerva, but she was getting old and leaky. I

meant it should be my last v'y'ge in her, and so it proved. She

had been an excellent vessel in her day. Of the cowards aboard her

I can't say so much."

"Then you were wrecked?" I asked, as he made a long pause.

"I wa'n't caught astern o' the lighter by any fault of mine,"

said the captain gloomily. "We left Fort Churchill and run out

into the Bay with a light pair o' heels; but I had been vexed to

death with their red-tape rigging at the company's office, and

chilled with stayin' on deck an' tryin' to hurry up things, and

when we were well out o' sight o' land, headin' for Hudson's

Straits, I had a bad turn o' some sort o' fever, and had to stay

below. The days were getting short, and we made good runs, all

well on board but me, and the crew done their work by dint of hard

driving."

I began to find this unexpected narrative a little dull.

Captain Littlepage spoke with a kind of slow correctness that

lacked the longshore high flavor to which I had grown used; but I

listened respectfully while he explained the winds having become

contrary, and talked on in a dreary sort of way about his voyage,

the bad weather, and the disadvantages he was under in the

lightness of his ship, which bounced about like a chip in a

bucket, and would not answer the rudder or properly respond to the

most careful setting of sails.

"So there we were blowin' along anyways," he complained; but

looking at me at this moment, and seeing that my thoughts were

unkindly wandering, he ceased to speak.

"It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure," said I,

with redoubled interest.

"It was a dog's life," said the poor old gentleman, quite

reassured, "but it made men of those who followed it. I see a

change for the worse even in our own town here; full of loafers

now, small and poor as 'tis, who once would have followed the sea,

every lazy soul of 'em. There is no occupation so fit for just

that class o' men who never get beyond the fo'cas'le. I view it,

in addition, that a community narrows down and grows dreadful

ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no

knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled

newspaper. In the old days, a good part o' the best men here knew

a hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They

saw the world for themselves, and like's not their wives and

children saw it with them. They may not have had the best of

knowledge to carry with 'em sight-seein', but they were some

acquainted with foreign lands an' their laws, an' could see outside

the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet; they got some sense o'

proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and their houses were

better within an' without. Shipping's a terrible loss to this part

o' New England from a social point o' view, ma'am."

"I have thought of that myself," I returned, with my interest

quite awakened. "It accounts for the change in a great many

things,--the sad disappearance of sea-captains,--doesn't it?"

"A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading," said my

companion, brightening still more, and taking on a most touching

air of unreserve. "A captain is not expected to be familiar with

his crew, and for company's sake in dull days and nights he turns

to his book. Most of us old shipmasters came to know 'most

everything about something; one would take to readin' on farming

topics, and some were great on medicine,--but Lord help their poor

crews!--or some were all for history, and now and then there'd be

one like me that gave his time to the poets. I was well acquainted

with a shipmaster that was all for bees an' beekeepin'; and if you

met him in port and went aboard, he'd sit and talk a terrible while

about their havin' so much information, and the money that could be

made out of keepin' 'em. He was one of the smartest captains that

ever sailed the seas, but they used to call the Newcastle,

a great bark he commanded for many years, Tuttle's beehive. There

was old Cap'n Jameson: he had notions of Solomon's Temple, and made

a very handsome little model of the same, right from the Scripture

measurements, same's other sailors make little ships and design new

tricks of rigging and all that. No, there's nothing to take the

place of shipping in a place like ours. These bicycles offend me

dreadfully; they don't afford no real opportunities of experience

such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when folks left home in the

old days they left it to some purpose, and when they got home they

stayed there and had some pride in it. There's no large-minded way

of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule everything;

we're all turned upside down and going back year by year."

"Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not," said I, trying to

soothe his feelings.

There was a silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the

noise of the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange

warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late

golden robin, with the most joyful and eager of voices, was singing

close by in a thicket of wild roses.

VI

The Waiting Place

"HOW DID YOU manage with the rest of that rough voyage on the

Minerva?" I asked.

"I shall be glad to explain to you," said Captain Littlepage,

forgetting his grievances for the moment. "If I had a map at hand

I could explain better. We were driven to and fro 'way up toward

what we used to call Parry's Discoveries, and lost our bearings.

It was thick and foggy, and at last I lost my ship; she drove on a

rock, and we managed to get ashore on what I took to be a barren

island, the few of us that were left alive. When she first struck,

the sea was somewhat calmer than it had been, and most of the crew,

against orders, manned the long-boat and put off in a hurry, and

were never heard of more. Our own boat upset, but the carpenter

kept himself and me above water, and we drifted in. I had no

strength to call upon after my recent fever, and laid down to die;

but he found the tracks of a man and dog the second day, and

got along the shore to one of those far missionary stations that

the Moravians support. They were very poor themselves, and in

distress; 'twas a useless place. There were but few Esquimaux left

in that region. There we remained for some time, and I became

acquainted with strange events.

The captain lifted his head and gave me a questioning glance.

I could not help noticing that the dulled look in his eyes had

gone, and there was instead a clear intentness that made them seem

dark and piercing.

"There was a supply ship expected, and the pastor, an

excellent Christian man, made no doubt that we should get passage

in her. He was hoping that orders would come to break up the

station; but everything was uncertain, and we got on the best we

could for a while. We fished, and helped the people in other ways;

there was no other way of paying our debts. I was taken to the

pastor's house until I got better; but they were crowded, and I

felt myself in the way, and made excuse to join with an old seaman,

a Scotchman, who had built him a warm cabin, and had room in it for

another. He was looked upon with regard, and had stood by the

pastor in some troubles with the people. He had been on one of

those English exploring parties that found one end of the road to

the north pole, but never could find the other. We lived like dogs

in a kennel, or so you'd thought if you had seen the hut from the

outside; but the main thing was to keep warm; there were piles of

bird-skins to lie on, and he'd made him a good bunk, and there was

another for me. 'Twas dreadful dreary waitin' there; we begun to

think the supply steamer was lost, and my poor ship broke up and

strewed herself all along the shore. We got to watching on the

headlands; my men and me knew the people were short of supplies and

had to pinch themselves. It ought to read in the Bible, 'Man

cannot live by fish alone,' if they'd told the truth of things;

'taint bread that wears the worst on you! First part of the time,

old Gaffett, that I lived with, seemed speechless, and I didn't

know what to make of him, nor he of me, I dare say; but as we got

acquainted, I found he'd been through more disasters than I had,

and had troubles that wa'n't going to let him live a great while.

It used to ease his mind to talk to an understanding person, so we

used to sit and talk together all day, if it rained or blew so that

we couldn't get out. I'd got a bad blow on the back of my head at

the time we came ashore, and it pained me at times, and my strength

was broken, anyway; I've never been so able since."

Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.

"Then I had the good of my reading," he explained presently.

"I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his

books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember.

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a

man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there

it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea

terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to

the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was

nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those

passages of verse.

"Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to

himself; he was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon

his mind. He thought when I got home I could interest the

scientific men in his discovery: but they're all taken up with

their own notions; some didn't even take pains to answer the

letters I wrote. You observe that I said this crippled man Gaffett

had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I now tell you that the

ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and two officers were

saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge later that

those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on was

run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and

he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country 'way up

north beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett

believed it was the next world to this."

"What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?" I exclaimed. The old

man was bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder

before he spoke the last sentence.

"To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful," he

said, going on with his story quite steadily after the moment of

excitement had passed. "'Twas first a tale of dogs and sledges,

and cold and wind and snow. Then they begun to find the ice grow

rotten; they had been frozen in, and got into a current flowing

north, far up beyond Fox Channel, and they took to their boats when

the ship got crushed, and this warm current took them out of sight

of the ice, and into a great open sea; and they still followed it

due north, just the very way they had planned to go. Then they

struck a coast that wasn't laid down or charted, but the cliffs

were such that no boat could land until they found a bay and struck

across under sail to the other side where the shore looked lower;

they were scant of provisions and out of water, but they got sight

of something that looked like a great town. 'For God's sake,

Gaffett!' said I, the first time he told me. 'You don't mean a

town two degrees farther north than ships had ever been?' for he'd

got their course marked on an old chart that he'd pieced out at the

top; but he insisted upon it, and told it over and over again, to

be sure I had it straight to carry to those who would be

interested. There was no snow and ice, he said, after they had

sailed some days with that warm current, which seemed to come right

from under the ice that they'd been pinched up in and had

been crossing on foot for weeks."

"But what about the town?" I asked. "Did they get to the

town?"

"They did," said the captain, "and found inhabitants; 'twas an

awful condition of things. It appeared, as near as Gaffett could

express it, like a place where there was neither living nor dead.

They could see the place when they were approaching it by sea

pretty near like any town, and thick with habitations; but all at

once they lost sight of it altogether, and when they got close

inshore they could see the shapes of folks, but they never could

get near them,--all blowing gray figures that would pass along

alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching.

The men were frightened at first, but the shapes never came near

them,--it was as if they blew back; and at last they all got bold

and went ashore, and found birds' eggs and sea fowl, like any wild

northern spot where creatures were tame and folks had never been,

and there was good water. Gaffett said that he and another man

came near one o' the fog-shaped men that was going along slow with

the look of a pack on his back, among the rocks, an' they chased

him; but, Lord! he flittered away out o' sight like a leaf the wind

takes with it, or a piece of cobweb. They would make as if they

talked together, but there was no sound of voices, and 'they acted

as if they didn't see us, but only felt us coming towards them,'

says Gaffett one day, trying to tell the particulars. They

couldn't see the town when they were ashore. One day the captain

and the doctor were gone till night up across the high land where

the town had seemed to be, and they came back at night beat out and

white as ashes, and wrote and wrote all next day in their

notebooks, and whispered together full of excitement, and they were

sharp-spoken with the men when they offered to ask any questions.

"Then there came a day," said Captain Littlepage, leaning

toward me with a strange look in his eyes, and whispering quickly.

"The men all swore they wouldn't stay any longer; the man on watch

early in the morning gave the alarm, and they all put off in the

boat and got a little way out to sea. Those folks, or whatever

they were, come about 'em like bats; all at once they raised

incessant armies, and come as if to drive 'em back to sea. They

stood thick at the edge o' the water like the ridges o' grim war;<