all came true. When the captain saw
me, he started back and exclaimed,--"What sent you here?"

I said, "An angel."

"And an angel told me you were coming," he replied.

Active work saved me. For years I never dared rest. I shrank back from a
leisure hour as from a dark chasm.

The greater part of my life has been passed upon the sea. As I
approached middle age, people would joke me upon my single life. They
could never know what a painful chord they struck, and I could never
tell them. Beautiful girls were pointed out to me. I could not see them.
Margaret's face always came between.

This bantering a single man is very common. I often wonder that people
dare do it. How does the world know what early disappointment he may be
mourning over? Is it anything to laugh about, that he has nobody to love
him,--nobody he may call his own,--no home? Seated in your pleasant
family-circle, the bright faces about him fade away, and he sees only a
vision of what might have been. Yet nobody supposes we have feeling. No
mother, dressing up her little boy for a walk, thinks of _our_ noticing
how cunning he looks, with the feather in his hat. No mother, weeping
over the coffin of her child, dreams that _we_ have pity and sorrow in
our hearts for her.

Thus the world shuts us out from all sympathy with its joys or
afflictions. But the world doesn't know everything,--least of all what
is passing in the heart of an old bachelor.

* * * * *

Jamie and Mary are old folks now. He never went to sea after his
marriage. Father set him up in a store. I should make it my home with
them, but they live at the old place, and I am always better away from
there.

Mrs. Maylie was right about my noticing children. I like to sit on the
stone wall and talk with them. No face comes between theirs and
mine,--unless it's the little girl's who moved away. Farmer Hill's is a
pleasant family. His grandchildren call me Captain Joseph. I humor them
almost as much as he does. When huckleberries come, they wonder why I
won't let them take that little rough-looking basket that hangs over the
looking-glass. 'Tis the one Margaret made that night in the hut on The
Mountains.

* * * * *

THE SNOW-MAN.

The fields are white with the glittering snow,
Save down by the brook, where the alders grow,
And hang their branches, black and bare,
O'er the stream that wanders darkly there;