“Mr. Brown’s going to write to-morrow to his folks and yours. What is your name, my boy?”
“Edward Gates, sir. They call me Ned on board ship.”
“You are from Salem, too?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Brown and I live on the same street—King Street. His house is only four doors from mine.”
“Then you’ve always known him?”
“O, yes, sir. I went to school with him. He was one of the big boys, and I was a little one. I used to say my lessons to him when the master was busy, and sometimes he kept school when the master was sick. Sometimes, when his father’s ship was in port, he would get her yawl boat, and give us little fellows a sail.”
After the building of the Casco, Charlie had been enabled to gratify his taste for cultivating the soil and improving his place. The Hard-scrabble, under the command of Seth Warren, and the Casco, under that of Isaac Murch, had made profitable voyages. Charlie and John found themselves in possession both of means and leisure. Charlie had built a large house, roomy enough to contain his men whenever he wanted to build more vessels, a barn, workshop, and other out-buildings. Hard wood stumps soon decay, white pine will last fifty years, and oak much longer than beech, maple or birch. The slope in front of the house presented a most enchanting view. Directly in front of the house was a most noble growth of forest trees, where the birch, beech, maple, and oak, in associate beauty, intermingled their huge trunks, covered with moss, and of such majestic height as to permit the buildings to be seen between their stems. A footpath wound among them to the outer edge, where, between their gnarled and twisted roots, gleamed the clear waters of Silver Spring.
Almost any summer or autumn morning, about nine o’clock, you might see a gray squirrel sitting on one of the great tree roots, viewing himself in the transparent water, washing his face, and making his toilet by its aid. Scattered all along on the surface of the slope margining the beach were clumps and single trees, of peculiar beauty and vast size, which Charlie, by abstaining from the use of fire, had spared; thus preserving what it would have required seventy years, and a large outlay, to have obtained by planting.