The village itself was so steeped in autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird’s-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.
Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when they are pleased—and as he always did when he was pleased—and said,—
“A mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of my life!”
Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down to the pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it from the level of his own natural element. He had seen many things and places, and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a vigorous memory. He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,—a New-Englander,—but he was a citizen of the world, and a combination of most of the best qualities of most of its best countries.
For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and blue trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking with the fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery, and the tides, and the currents, and the race of water off that point yonder, and what you kept in your eye, and got into a line with what else when you ran into the little harbour; and other nautical profundities. Among the men who exchanged ideas with the captain was a young fellow, who exactly hit his fancy,—a young fisherman of two or three and twenty, in the rough sea-dress of his craft, with a brown face, dark curling hair, and bright, modest eyes under his Sou’wester hat, and with a frank, but simple and retiring manner, which the captain found uncommonly taking. “I’d bet a thousand dollars,” said the captain to himself, “that your father was an honest man!”
“Might you be married now?” asked the captain, when he had had some talk with this new acquaintance.
“Not yet.”
“Going to be?” said the captain.
“I hope so.”
The captain’s keen glance followed the slightest possible turn of the dark eye, and the slightest possible tilt of the Sou’wester hat. The captain then slapped both his legs, and said to himself,—
“Never knew such a good thing in all my life! There’s his sweetheart looking over the wall!”
There was a very pretty girl looking over the wall, from a little platform of cottage, vine, and fuchsia; and she certainly did not look as if the presence of this young fisherman in the landscape made it any the less sunny and hopeful for her.
Captain Jorgan, having doubled himself up to laugh with that hearty good-nature which is quite exultant in the innocent happiness of other people, had undoubted himself, and was going to start a new subject, when there appeared coming down the lower ladders of stones, a man whom he hailed as “Tom Pettifer, Ho!” Tom Pettifer, Ho, responded with alacrity, and in speedy course descended on the pier.
“Afraid of a sun-stroke in England in November, Tom, that you wear your tropical hat, strongly paid outside and paper-lined inside, here?” said the captain, eyeing it.
“It’s as well to be on the safe side, sir,” replied Tom.
“Safe side!” repeated the captain, laughing. “You’d guard against a sun-stroke, with that old hat, in an Ice Pack. Wa’al! What have you made out at the Post-office?”
“It is the Post-office, sir.”
“What’s the Post-office?” said the captain.
“The name, sir. The name keeps the Post-office.”
“A coincidence!” said the captain. “A lucky bit! Show me where it is. Good-bye, shipmates, for the present! I shall come and have another look at you, afore I leave, this afternoon.”
This was addressed to all there, but especially the young fisherman; so all there acknowledged it, but especially the young fisherman. “He’s a sailor!” said one to another, as they looked after the captain moving away. That he was; and so outspeaking was the sailor in him, that although his dress had nothing nautical about it, with the single exception of its colour, but was a suit of a shore-going shape and form, too long in the sleeves and too short in the legs, and too unaccommodating everywhere, terminating earthward in a pair of Wellington boots, and surmounted by a tall, stiff hat, which no mortal could have worn at sea in any wind under heaven; nevertheless, a glimpse of his sagacious, weather-beaten face, or his strong, brown hand, would have established the captain’s calling. Whereas Mr. Pettifer—a man of a certain plump neatness, with a curly whisker, and elaborately nautical in a jacket, and shoes, and all things correspondent—looked no more like a seaman, beside Captain Jorgan, than he looked like a sea-serpent.
The two climbed high up the village,—which had the most arbitrary turns and twists in it, so that the cobbler’s house came dead across the ladder, and to have held a reasonable course, you must have gone through his house, and through him too, as he sat at his work between two little windows,—with one eye microscopically on the geological formation of that part of Devonshire, and the other telescopically on the open sea,—the two climbed high up the village, and stopped before a quaint little house, on which was painted, “MRS. RAYBROCK, DRAPER;” and also “POST-OFFICE.” Before it, ran a rill of murmuring water, and access to it was gained by a little plank-bridge.
“Here’s the name,” said Captain Jorgan, “sure enough. You can come in if you like, Tom.”
The captain opened the door, and passed into an odd little shop, about six feet high, with a great variety of beams and bumps in the ceiling, and, besides the principal window giving on the ladder of stones, a purblind little window of a single pane of glass, peeping out of an abutting corner at the sun-lighted ocean, and winking at its brightness.
“How do you do, ma’am?” said the captain. “I am very glad to see you. I have come a long way to see you.”
“Have you, sir? Then I am sure I am very glad to see you, though I don’t know you from Adam.”
Thus a comely elderly woman, short of stature, plump of form, sparkling and dark of eye, who, perfectly clean and neat herself, stood in the midst of her perfectly clean and neat arrangements, and surveyed Captain Jorgan with smiling curiosity. “Ah! but you are a sailor, sir,” she added, almost immediately, and with a slight movement of her hands, that was not very unlike wringing them; “then you are heartily welcome.”
“Thank’ee, ma’am,” said the captain, “I don’t know what it is, I am sure; that brings out the salt in me, but everybody seems to see it on the crown of my hat and the collar of my coat. Yes, ma’am, I am in that way of life.”
“And the other gentleman, too,” said Mrs. Raybrock.
“Well now, ma’am,” said the captain, glancing shrewdly at the other gentleman, “you are that nigh right, that he goes to sea,—if that makes him a sailor. This is my steward, ma’am, Tom Pettifer; he’s been a’most all trades you could name, in the course of his life,—would have bought all your chairs and tables once, if you had wished to sell ’em,—but now he’s
