Thus, when he became embarrassed, instead of saying, “Good enough for him,” “He will have to leave off some of his quarter-deck airs now,” everybody felt sorry for him, and told him so.
Indeed, everything about the Rhines family was pleasant, and excited cheerful emotions. The old house itself had a most comfortable, cosy look, as it lay in the very eye of the sun, with an orchard before it, green fields stretching along the water, sheltered on the north-west by high land and forest. The shores were fringed with thickets of beech and birch, branches of which, at high tide, almost touched the surface of the water.
Some houses are high and thin, resembling a sheet of gingerbread set on edge; they impress you with a painful feeling of insecurity, as though they might blow over. Such houses generally have all the windows abreast, so that when the curtains are up, and the blinds open, you can look right through them. They seem cold, cheerless, repellent; you shrug your shoulders and shiver as you look at them. But this house was large on the ground, and looked as if it grew there, with an ell and long shed running to the barn, a sunny door-yard, a spreading beech before the end door, with a great wood-pile under it, suggestive of rousing fires.
There was a row of Lombardy poplars in front of the house, and a large rock maple at the corner of the barn-yard, which the children always tapped in the spring to get sap to drink and make sap coffee. There was a real hospitable look about the old homestead; it seemed to say, “There’s pork in the cellar, there’s corn in the crib, hay in the barn, and a good fire on the hearth: walk in, neighbor, and make yourself at home.”
But the popularity of Captain Rhines among his neighbors had a deeper root than this. A great many of the young men in the neighborhood had been their first voyage to sea with him; he had treated them in such a manner, had taken so much pains to advance them in their profession, that they respected and loved him ever after.
When it was known in the neighborhood that Captain Rhines was going to sea, the question was not, how he should get men, but how he should get rid of them, there were so many eager for the berth.
It would have done your heart good to have seen the happy faces of the men grouped together on that ship’s forecastle, waiting, like hounds straining in the leash, for the order to man the windlass; not an old broken-down shellback among them, but all the neighbors’ boys, in their red shirts, and duck trousers white as the driven snow, which their mothers had washed.
As each one of them had a character to sustain, was anxious to outdo his shipmate, and the greater portion of them were in love with some neighbor’s daughter, and expected to be married as soon as they were master of a ship, it is evident there was very little to do in the way of discipline. It was a jolly sight, when there came a gale of wind, to see them scamper up the rigging, racing with each other for the “weather-earing.”
Captain Rhines, though a large and powerfully built man, was a pygmy to his son Ben. Ben measured, crooks and all, six feet two inches in height, weighing two hundred and thirty pounds. He was possessed of strength in proportion to his size, and, what was more remarkable, was as spry as an eel, and could jump out of a hogshead without touching his hands to it. His neighbors called him “Lion Ben.” He obtained the appellation from this circumstance.
One day when the inhabitants of the district were at work on the roads, they dug out a large rock. Ben, then nineteen years of age, took it up, carried it out of the road, dropped it, and said it might stay there till they raised another man in town strong enough to take it back.