ike a rabbit to his burrow, while
she marched up the gangway. "Can't abide dirt," says mother, and even
the new boy heard not a word else 'cept the splash. For mother just
escorted that nigger right through the galley, out at the other end,
over the port rail, and boosted him into the blue harbor, for the first
and only bath he'd ever had. Then she took off her horn spectacles, her
old buckskin gloves, and her bonnet, and sot to cleaning a galley which
hadn't been washed since the days of President Lincoln. Floor, range,
walls, beams, pots, kettles, plates and dishes, she washed and scrubbed
and polished. She hadn't time to listen to the wet nigger or the mate,
and narry a man on board could get more than yea or nay out of mother.
She cooked them a supper too good to be eaten and spoilt, then set the
dishes to rights, got the lamp a-shining, and axed to be shown round the
ship. You should have seen the idlers aft and the boys forrard, redding
up as if all their mothers was expected. As to the nigger, the fellers
made a habit of pitching him overboard until he got tired of coming.

The cap'n and me comes back along with the dinghy, makes fast, and
climbs aboard. There's old gray mother, with the horn specs, calm in her
own kitchen, just tellin' us to set right down to supper. Cap'n lives
aft, and I belongs up forrard, being ordinary seaman, and less important
aboard than the old man's pig. Yet somehow mother knew, feeding us both
in the galley, and standing by while we fed. Never a word, but mother
had a light for Captain Smith's cigar, and her eyes looking hungry at me
for fear she'd be sent ashore.

"Well, ma'am," says the captain, "sent your baggage aft? Oh, we'll soon
get your baggage aboard."

Then I heard him on deck seeing mother's dunnage into the spare berth
aft, and the nigger's turkey thrown out on the wharf.

Sort of strange to me remembering mother, gaunt, bitter-hard, always in
the right, with lots to say. And here was little mother sobbing her
heart out on the breast of my jersey. Just the same mother changed. Said
she was fed up with the Labrador, coming away to see the world, meet
folks, and have a good time; but would I be ashamed of having her with
me at sea? Surely that had been old mother back there in the long ago
time, and now it was young mother laughing just because she'd cried.

Shamed? All the ways down from Joe Beef's clear to Rimouski you'll hear
that yarn to-day, of how the old sea custo