I think I have given you almost his words. You see they were short, real words, and the only fear I have is that in repeating them I may have lost the quiet, deep-seated earnestness that was in his voice. He spoke that night from his heart. We were on Water Street now and it was time for us to part.
"Thank you," I said, and I spoke as sincerely as he had spoken, "and if you don't mind I would like to know your name. It is James, what?"
He reached out a big hand and took a firm grip of mine and said: "I'm Jim. Harbor Jim they call me." And then I remembered that I had been looking for him.
[CHAPTER III]
AN ENGAGEMENT AS PLANNED
"Come," came a voice from within and I opened the door and stepped into Harbor Jim's cozy home. Its warmth and cheer were in sharp contrast to the evening without. It was raining hard and everything was saturated with water. Out of the chill and wet, I stepped across the threshold into warmth and dryness.
I thought at once of the Cotter's Saturday night. In the centre of the room at a little table, close to a kerosene lamp, was Harbor Jim reading from the Bible, and sharing the rather uncertain light with him was his wife with a pile of stockings to be mended, in her lap. Beyond them, a small fire-place with rough stone dogs. A spruce fire crackled like pop corn and did its best to dissipate anything of disconsolateness that might have crept in from the night's cold rain. At the right of the fire-place, on a roll of comforters, lay a little girl of perhaps two years, breathing gently in her sleep.
Harbor Jim did not rise to greet me but with a motion of his hand expressed his desire that I should remove my wet coat and take the empty chair. He paused long enough for me to be comfortably seated and resumed his reading. He was in the midst of the Ninety-First Psalm, and he read slowly on, as one none too familiar with print and anxious that no word or meaning be lost.