ick more of reminiscence than imagination, since the airs the
fishermen chanted were based, nearly all, upon Christian songs that the
earlier missionaries had brought hither; the words might be Polynesian
but the cadence that carried the words was likely to be the cadence of
some pioneer hymnster.

And ever and always the vision had a certain delectable climax; a
definite consummation most devoutly wished for. For its final upshot
would be that Ethan Pratt would behold himself growing old in the
peaceful safe harbour of South New Medford, anchored fast by his
heartstrings to a small white cottage, all furbished and plenished
within, all flowers and shrubs roundabout, with a kitchen garden at its
back, and on beyond an orchard of whitewashed trees where buff cochins
clucked beneath the ripening fruit, and on beyond this in turn a hay
meadow stretching away toward rising foothills.

He saw himself working in the flowers and tilling the vegetable garden.
He watched himself quitting this haven to walk a sedate way to worship
of a Sunday morning. With his mind's eye he followed his own course in a
buggy along a country road in the fall of the year when the maples had
turned and the goldenrod spread its carpet of tawny glory across the
fields. And invariably his companion in these simple homely comfortable
employments was a little woman who wore gold-rimmed glasses and starchy
print frocks.

Into the picture no third figure ever obtruded. With her alone he
conceived of himself as walking side by side through all the remaining
days of his life. For this mousy methodical little man had his great
romance. Unsuspected and undetected, inside the commonplace cover of his
body it burned with a clear and a steady flame. It had burned there,
never flickering, never wavering, through all the days of his faring
into far and foreign parts. Since childhood the two of them had been
engaged. It was she who wrote him the letters that came, a fat sheaf of
them, by every steamer; it was to her that he wrote in reply. It was for
the sake of her and in the intention of making a home for her that
through four years he had endured this imprisonment or this martyrdom or
this whatever you may be pleased to call it, away off here on the
opposite side of the world from her. She was saving and he was saving,
both for a common purpose. Back there at home it cost her little to
live, and out here it cost him less. In fact, it cost him almost
nothing. N