older common-people I mean, stopped and stared after us, and some said queer things, and some called us queer names. A fisherwoman, for instance, sang out —
“Hullo! my chickabiddies. Got out, then? W’y you looks as much alike as pigeons’ eggs.”
A swarthy old sailor hailed us with —
“Whither away, my pirates bold?” Jill laughed at this. We loved pirates. Then we came to a place where two fishermen, rough and weather-beaten, in dandy, dark, Sunday sou’-westers, and dark blue Sunday jerseys and polished top-boots, were leaning against a boat, and one of them must shake hands politely and say —
“Hullo! my young hearties! W’y it does one’s heart good to look at ye! Ain’t they alike, Bill? Keep ’em together, Bill, till I run up for Nancy.”
Nancy came, a good-looking, portly fisherman’s wife, and for a time she did nothing but stick her hands in her sides and laugh. Oh, she did laugh, to be sure!
Then her husband and Bill, his mate, laughed too, and the seagulls chimed in, and somehow made us think of Punch and Judy. So then we laughed also, and a pretty chorus it was.
“Bless the darlings, though,” said Nancy; “it’s a shame to laugh; we don’t mean anything unmannerly but – ha, ha, ha, he, he, he,” and the chorus was all done over again.
“I say, lads,” said the first speaker, “come for a sail with us to-morrow, or next day, will ye?”
“We would,” we replied, both in a breath, and both in the same words precisely, “if auntie would let us.”
“Ah! bless her, bring auntie too. We’ll cushion the boat, Bill, won’t us?”
“That we will, Joe.”
“Well, we said we’d tell auntie,” and away we went. We only met one man who spoke to us going back, and he said – “Good evening, young double and quits.” Of course we did not say a word to auntie that evening about the invitation, but after a turn on the beach next day, during which we met our fisher friends, who renewed the request, we broached the subject.
Auntie tossed her head a little at first, but when we mentioned about the cushions she smiled and said – “Good people, I dare say. Well, it is evident they know we are gentlefolks. You can tell them we’ll go to-morrow afternoon.”
After school hours Jill and I ran to tell our new-found friends that we were to be allowed to come, and that auntie was coming as well.
They were so pleased that they kept us a whole hour in their queer, old-fashioned cottage, in which everything was as strange and wonderful to us as some of the places we read of in our old story-books.
Poor Jill! It was really strange the dependence he had upon me, his twin brother – his elder brother – his second self. I but mention the following in proof of this. It happened about the time we first made the acquaintance of the boatmen. Jill had gone to look for nests all by himself for a wonder. Unfortunately he fell over a cliff. Not all the way down, else there would have been no more Jill – and no more Jack, perhaps, for I hardly think I could have lived without my brother. He had been in his perilous position for hours before found. Listening at last near the top of the cliff, I could hear his plaintive, pleading voice calling me, though he knew not I was there.
“Come to me, Jack, come to me,” he prayed, “for I cannot come to you.”
I had reason to remember these strange words in after life, as will be seen.
Chapter Three
The Story of a Shipwreck – A Mystery – The Fate of Poor Joe
We all went on that boat cruise – that is, auntie went, and Jill and I. Auntie appeared to take us with her but we were really taking her. That was fun.
There was nothing remarkable about the cruise, except that it was the first of many far more delightful, for Jill and me.
Auntie behaved like an angel all through, if one could conceive of an angel wearing two pairs of spectacles one on top of the other and long black mits. But auntie’s heart contained the angel, and to-day she never once looked over her glasses – always through them.
The fishermen, Bill and Joe, “ma’am”-ed her and “miss”-ed her, and she smiled a deal, and did not get even squeamish, for she was a sailor’s daughter, and knew all about boats and ships.
We sailed straight away out, and tacked round an island, and there was a lumpy bit of a sea on. But auntie steered part of the way, much to her own delight and the admiration of Bill and Joe. Sometimes the boat gave a jump or fell down with a jerk into the trough of a sea, and the sail would tighten and the sheet would strain, and perhaps a feather of a wave would skim across the boat and hit us all; but nothing disturbed the equanimity of our bold Aunt Serapheema.
She shook hands so prettily, too, with the men and with Nancy, who curtseyed so low, that she looked like a brig under full sail settling down by the stern.
The men lifted their hats, and I’m sure each had something in his hand that auntie had left there; then away we came, and Jill and I jumped on lumps of seaweed to crack the little bladders all the way home, and auntie didn’t mind a bit.
“It would do you good, mamma,” she said to mother at dinner that day, “to go out for a sail now and then; I must say it has made me feel quite young again.”
The pointer did not strike one o’clock on Jill’s knuckles or mine all next forenoon, so of course we wished that auntie would always go out a-sailing.
But it was when telling my brother and me stories of a winter’s evening by the fire, or upstairs on the balcony in the sweet summer-time that auntie was at her very very best. Then the angel came out in earnest, and neither Jill nor I were ever a bit afraid of her. We would sit close up by her knee, and even lean across her lap, or toy with her mitted hands as we listened entranced to every word she said.
They were mostly stories of the ocean wave, and of far-away lands and climes beyond the setting sun. Indeed what else could a sailor’s daughter, whose father had gone down with his ship in the stormy Bay, speak to us about, secularly?
But she had the gift of telling Bible stories well also. The wonderful adventures of Joseph and his brethren quite enthralled us, and often after we went to bed I used to try to tell it in the same way and same words to Jill, but never so entrancingly, though he liked it so much that he often went to sleep before I had finished.
I said my mother was delicate, and this is the reason why auntie took such charge of us; but mother invariably came to our room after Sally had done with us, and would sit by our bedside sewing for an hour together sometimes. It was to her we said our prayers. No, we did not say them, for mother taught us to think and pray the prayer – to wish what we said, as it were; and we got into that habit, Jill and I, so that at any time when praying, with our hearts wandering, as it were, we believed the good angels never could hear that prayer, and never bear it away to the good Father on the great white throne of grace.
I dare say few boys love their mother so much as we loved our beautiful mother, but then one always does think just in that way about one’s own love. None other can be like it.
Well, at all events, our childhood, what with one thing or another, was a very happy one, and slipped all too soon away.
Why was it, I wonder, that
