Sabbath morning, after a rainy day and night, Charlie waking up, and looking, as he usually did the first thing, in the direction of Captain Rhines’s, missed the great bulk of the Ark, which before seemed to fill up the whole cove. The wind was north-west, and blowing a gale.
“Father,” he shouted, “the Ark is gone! I can’t see her at all.”
“Well,” replied Ben, “she has got a wind that will shove her over the gulf.”
On the summit of the middle ridge stood the tallest tree on the island, with an eagle’s nest on it. Beside it grew a large spruce, whose top reached to its lower limbs, and next to the spruce a scrub hemlock, whose lower limbs came almost to the ground. Charlie had made a bridge of poles from the spruce to the pine, and used to sit there, when the wind blew, till the tree shook so much that it frightened him, or the eagles came to their nest; but, after a while, they became so accustomed to him as to take fish from the limbs where he placed it. You could step from the ground to the hemlock, from that to the spruce, and from the spruce walk on the bridge to the pine. To this they went with the glass, saw the masts of the Ark just going out of sight, and watched them till they were lost in the distance.
It was impossible, now that the bustle and excitement of fitting away was over, for Ben to be otherwise than anxious respecting the result of this venture, and the safety of his father and friends in so strange a craft. But he kept his thoughts and misgivings (if he had any) to himself, though he afterwards said that it was the longest Sabbath he ever spent.
At night, after Charlie had gone to bed, Sally asked Ben what he was going about. He replied, to hew a barn frame; that, as he was going to raise crops, he must have some place to put them.
“I suppose you can do that kind of work alone, well enough?”
“Yes.”
“While it is pleasant weather, I would give Charlie a holiday, and let him ask John and Fred Williams to come over here; it would please him very much, and I really think he deserves it.”
“So do I. I’ll tell him in the morning that he may go over and get them. They say there isn’t a better behaved, smarter boy in town than Fred Williams, for all he was such a scape-grace a few months ago.”