“Nobody knowed it, and nobody telled me to come; I comed my own self, ’cause he shan’t be whipped. Fannie loves Tige.”
“You’ve good reason to love him, for if it had not been for him you’d been a dead baby now. I never will whip him, nor let anybody else.”
The captain then took her by the hand, and led her into the orchard, where he picked up some pears, and put in a basket; he then culled a bunch of flowers as large as she could carry, and putting the handle of the basket in Tige’s mouth, sent him home with her. The little girl, with her fears quieted, trudged along, putting her flowers to Tige’s nose for him to smell of, telling him he shouldn’t be licked, ’cause Captain Rhines said so.
CHAPTER IV.
BEN’S COURTSHIP.
Ben had never been to sea with his father. Captain Rhines didn’t believe it was a good plan for relations to be shipmates; he didn’t want his son to be “ship’s cousin,” but to rise on his own merits, as his father had done before him; and if he couldn’t do that, then he might stay down. But Ben had proved himself to be a man of capacity. The owners were all willing, and his father wanted him to take the ship and let him stay at home.
Ben gladly accepted the offer, and was making preparations to go; but there was a matter of great importance for him to settle, before he left home. Ben loved Sally Hadlock, though he had never dared to tell her of it.
She had a great many admirers among the young men, and he felt that it was risking altogether too much to go on a long voyage, and run the venture of Sally’s being snapped up by some of them before his return. The greatest source of apprehension in his mind was the fact, that he heard she had said, she never could, nor would, marry a man that followed the sea.
Her father and oldest brother were lost at sea. Sally could never forget the agony of her mother when her father’s sea chest came home, nor the trial of those bitter years, during which she and her mother had struggled along, and kept the family together until the younger children grew up.
Sally Hadlock was a poor girl, but she was as pretty as a May morning. Though she knew scarcely a note of music, she could warble like a bird, and, as the neighbors said, “she was faculized.” Everybody loved and respected Sally for her kindness to her mother, and because she was as modest as she was beautiful, and as lively as a humming-bird. Her mother idolized her, as well she might.