n' at all clear,
exceptin' about the takin' o' that whale; and that he told over and over
a hundred times, arter that fust time, just as I've told it to you, but
all before it and all behind it was shadders, till the great shadder of
all came over him.

"When I come to hear on 't, I said I hoped my father would meet that
'ere captain som'er's on the seas of eternity, and flog him within an
inch of his life; and I ha'n't repented the sayin' on't yet."

The tide had come up while John Chidlaw was telling his story, and his
little boat slid off the bar directly, when, taking up the oars, he soon
brought her to land.

"Bless your dear heart, John!" says Rose, pointing back to the boat's
name, as he handed her ashore, "would you believe I was so stupid as
not to see that the name o' your wessel was the same as my own? I read
it the _Rose Rolling_, to be sure!"

But John maintained that she was not stupid a single bit nor mite, but,
on the contrary, smart altogether beyond the common. "To come so nigh
the truth," says he, "and yet not get hold on 't, arter all, is a leetle
the slickest thing yet!"

And then he told, as they walked home together,--he with three bandboxes
in one arm, and her on the other,--all about his weary years of hardship
and poverty, and all about the beginning of his good fortune, the
running away of the horse and of the little girl who drew him after her,
because she reminded him so much of Rose herself as she used to be when
he looked down upon her so fondly from the roof in Baker's Row,--told
her of the child's father, and how he set him up in business,--of his
prosperity since, ending with her taking passage with him, which he said
was the best fortune of all.

"That was luck," says he, "that no words can shadder forth!" And then he
said, "I oughtn't to call it luck, my dear; it was just an intervention
of Divine Providence!" Then he corrected himself. "An interwention o'
Diwine Providence," says he,--"that's what it was!" And he hugged the
very bandboxes till he fairly stove them in.

About a month after this blessed luck, the milliner's shop was closed
one day at an unusually early hour, and the white-muslin curtains at the
parlor windows above might have been noticed to nutter and sway, as with
some gay excitement indoors. And so indeed there was. John had taken his
Rose for good and all, and the little parlor was full of glad hearts and
merry feet. All the milliner's apprentices and sewin