Whidden—"
My father sternly turned on me. "No son of mine shall climb through the cabin windows."
"But Captain Whidden—"
"I thought you desired to follow the sea—to ship before the mast."
"I do."
"Then say no more of Captain Whidden. If you wish to go to sea, well and good. I'll not stand in your way. But we'll seek no favoritism, you and I. You'll ship as boy, but you'll take your medicine like a man."
"Yes, sir," I said, trying perversely to conceal my joy.
"And as for Captain Whidden," my father added, "you'll find he cuts a very different figure aboard ship from that he shows in our drawing-room."
Then a smile twinkled through his severity, and he laid his hand firmly on my shoulder.
"Son, you have my permission ungrudgingly given. There was a time—well, your grandfather didn't see things as I did."
"But some day," I cried, "I'll have a counting-house of my own—some day—"
My father laughed kindly, and I, taken aback, blushed at my own eagerness.
"Anyway," I persisted, "Roger Hamlin is to go as supercargo."
"Roger—as supercargo?" exclaimed a low voice.
I turned and saw that my sister stood in the door.
"Where—when is he going?"
"To Canton on the Island Princess! And so am I," I cried.
"Oh!" she said. And she stood there, silent and a little pale.
"You'll not see much of Roger," my father remarked to me, still smiling. He had a way of enjoying a quiet joke at my expense, to him the more pleasing because I never was quite sure just wherein the humor lay.
"But I'm going," I cried. "I'm going—I'm going—I'm going!"
"At the end of the voyage," said my father, "we'll find out whether you still wish to follow the sea. After all, I'll go with you this evening, when supper is done, to see Joseph Whidden."
The lamps were lighted when we left the house, and long beams from the windows fell on the walk and on the road. We went down the street side by side, my father absently swinging his cane, I wondering if it were not beneath the dignity of a young man about to go to sea that his parent should accompany him on such an errand.
Just as we reached the corner, a man who had come up the street a little distance behind us turned in at our own front gate, and my father, seeing me look back when the gate slammed, smiled and said, "I'll venture a guess, Bennie-my-lad, that some one named Roger is calling at our house this evening."
Afterwards—long, long afterwards—I remembered the incident.
When my father let the knocker fall against Captain Whidden's great front door, my heart, it seemed to me, echoed the sound and then danced away at a lively pace. A servant, whom I watched coming from somewhere behind the stairs, admitted us to the quiet hall; then another door opened silently, a brighter light shone out upon us, and a big, grave man appeared. He welcomed us with a few thoughtful words and, by a motion of his hand, sent us before him into the room where he had been sitting.
"And so," said Captain Whidden, when we had explained our errand, "I am to have this young man aboard my ship."
"If you will, sir," I cried eagerly, yet anxiously, too, for he did not seem nearly so well pleased as I had expected.
"Yes, Ben, you may come with us to Canton; but as your father says, you must fill your own boots and stand on your own two feet. And will you, friend Lathrop,"—he turned to my father—"hazard a venture on the voyage?"
My father smiled. "I think, Joe," he said, "that I've placed a considerable venture in your hands already."
Captain Whidden nodded. "So you have, so you have. I'll watch it as best I can, too, though of course I'll see little of the boy. Let him go now. I'll talk with you a while if I may."
My father glanced at me, and I got up.
Captain Whidden rose, too. "Come down in the morning," he said. "You can sign with us at the Websters' counting-house.—And good-bye, Ben," he added, extending his hand.
"Good-bye? You don't mean—that I'm not to go with you?"
He smiled. "It'll be a long time, Ben, before you and I meet again on quite such terms as these."
Then I saw what he meant, and shook his hand and walked away without looking back. Nor did I ever learn what he and my father talked about after I left them there together.
CHAPTER II
BILL HAYDEN
More than two-score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I, Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship Island Princess, and in them I have achieved, I think I can say with due modesty, a position of some importance in my own world. But although innumerable activities have crowded to the full each intervening year, neither the aspirations of youth nor the successes of maturity nor the dignities of later life have effaced from my memory the picture of myself, a boy on the deck of the Island Princess in April, 1809.
I thought myself very grand as the wind whipped my pantaloons against my ankles and flapped the ribbons of the sailor hat that I had pulled snugly down; and I imagined myself the hero of a thousand stirring adventures in the South Seas, which I should relate when I came back an able seaman at the very least. Never was sun so bright; never were seas so blue; never was ship so smart as the Island Princess.
On her black hull a nicely laid band of white ran sheer from stem to stern; her bows swelled to meet the seas in a gentle curve that hinted the swift lines of our clippers of more recent years. From mainmast heel to truck, from ensign halyard to tip of flying jib-boom, her well-proportioned masts and spars and taut rigging stood up so trimly in one splendidly coördinating structure, that the veriest lubber must have acknowledged her the finest handiwork of man.
It was like a play to watch the men sitting here and there on deck, or talking idly around the forecastle, while Captain Whidden and the chief mate conferred together aft. I was so much taken with it all that I had no eyes for my own people who were there to see me off, until straight out from the crowded wharf there came a young man whom I knew well. His gray eyes, firm lips, square chin, and broad shoulders had been familiar to me ever since I could remember.
As he was rowed briskly to the ship, I waved to him and called out, "O
Roger—ahoy!"
I thought, when he glanced up from the boat, that his gray eyes twinkled and that there was the flutter of a smile on his well-formed lips; but he looked at me and through me and seemed not to see me, and it came over me all at once that from the cabin to
