distinct bit
of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy.

When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to his native town,
with money enough, hardly earned, and carefully kept, to buy a fine
large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade; and shortly
after he married his cousin's daughter. He found his cousin, who had
supported herself in her widowhood by teaching a school, residing in a
dingy, old-fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windows
of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by
their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of the last of the
buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with
Spanish gold; not, however, with a great deal of it, for,
notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had
now fallen greatly into disrepair. It was fitted up with some of the
sailor's money, and, after his marriage, became his home,--a home
rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in
years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found
consolation, amid her troubles and privations, where it was surest to be
found. She was a meek-spirited, sincerely pious woman; and the sailor,
during his more distant voyages,--for he sometimes traded with ports of
the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of
England on the other,--had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had
fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously
tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would
have otherwise enjoyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's
great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy
accidents.

He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside
the pond: for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had
remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in
preserving that of others; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his
wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had
unfortunately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his
seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never
recovered. A clear frosty moonlight evening had set in; the pier-head
was glistening with new-formed ice; and one of the sailors, when engaged
in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed f