t him hard for a minute after we met. When we
had parted I had a sort of idea that he might take to drink, but
he hadn't. He looked very respectable and well-to-do in his black
coat and high city collar; but he was thinner and bonier than
when I had known him, and there were lines in his face, and I
thought his eyes had a queer look in them, half shifty, half
scared. He needn't have been afraid of me, for I didn't mean to
talk to his bride about the _Helen B. Jackson_.

He took me to his cottage first, and I could see that he was
proud of it. It wasn't above a cable's-length from high-water
mark, but the tide was running out, and there was already a broad
stretch of hard wet sand on the other side of the beach road.
Jack's bit of land ran back behind the cottage about a quarter of
a mile, and he said that some of the trees we saw were his. The
fences were neat and well kept, and there was a fair-sized barn a
little way from the cottage, and I saw some nice-looking cattle
in the meadows; but it didn't look to me to be much of a farm,
and I thought that before long Jack would have to leave his wife
to take care of it, and go to sea again. But I said it was a nice
farm, so as to seem pleasant, and as I don't know much about
these things I dare say it was, all the same. I never saw it but
that once. Jack told me that he and his brother had been born in
the cottage, and that when their father and mother died they
leased the land to Mamie's father, but had kept the cottage to
live in when they came home from sea for a spell. It was as neat
a little place as you would care to see: the floors as clean as
the decks of a yacht, and the paint as fresh as a man-o'-war.
Jack always was a good painter. There was a nice parlour on the
ground floor, and Jack had papered it and had hung the walls with
photographs of ships and foreign ports, and with things he had
brought home from his voyages: a boomerang, a South Sea club,
Japanese straw hats and a Gibraltar fan with a bull-fight on it,
and all that sort of gear. It looked to me as if Miss Mamie had
taken a hand in arranging it. There was a bran-new polished iron
Franklin stove set into the old fireplace, and a red table-cloth
from Alexandria, embroidered with those outlandish Egyptian
letters. It was all as bright and homelike as possible, and he
showed me everything, and was proud of everything, and I liked
him the better for it. But I wished that his voice would sound
more cheerf