but I have a vague sort of an idea that he was a big man with
big dark eyes and a great nose like the beak of a bird. _He_ had run
away to sea when--well, Napoleon was Emperor of the French when he ran
away to sea. Sailors had pigtails and all the rest of it. His brothers
did the same. At one time, in the 'sixties, there were six skippers
ploughing the ocean, all Carvilles, all big black-whiskered men. You may
hear of them yet in the ports out East.

"My father married four times. There was one peculiarity, or fatality if
you like, about the Carvilles, and that was their failure to beget sons.
Daughters came right along all the time. I have fourteen cousins, all
married, and all got boys! The first three wives my father had only
produced two daughters, who died before their mothers. You can
understand that those six big men took it badly there were no sons. When
the third wife died, childless, my father had given up the sea for a
while and had invested in a ship-yard at St. John, New Brunswick. It was
there that he met my mother.

"I can't go into details I never knew, so all I can say is that my
mother was French Canadian. They had a big farm away up the Petitcodiac
River and the girls used to come down to St. John to finish an education
that began in Moncton and really ended, in my mother's case, in London,
England.

"They built ships in those days in St. John, and some of the best were
my father's work. As I said, I don't remember him very well, but you
will understand how I felt when one day, about nine years ago, we put
into a little Spanish port for coal, and they made us fast to an old
wooden hulk in the harbour. As we came round her stern I was leaning
over the side and I saw the brass letters still on her square counter,
_Eastern Star, St. John, New Brunswick_. That was one of my father's
finest models. Pitch pine he made her of, and she's beautiful yet, for
all her disgrace. I climbed aboard of her while the Corcubion women were
trotting to and fro with the coal baskets, and looked round the poop.
There was the cuddy as good as ever, teak frames, maple panels, pine
flooring. That old hulk brought my old father before me as no
daguerreotype could do. There was his name cut on the beam, _John
Carville_. It may seem absurd to you people, but do you know, I realized
then, as I looked up and saw my father's name on that beam, nearly
smothered with countless coats of varnish, I realized how a young man of
family