The merchant then said to him, “Mr. Rhines, if you were buying this island on speculation, I should charge you a round price for it, as the timber is valuable, easy of access by water, the taxes are merely nominal, and your father prevents it from being plundered; but as you are buying it to make a home of, and I know what you have done for your father,—for he told me himself,—I shall let you have it at a low rate, and any length of time you wish to pay for it in.”
As they parted, he encouraged Ben by telling him that a Down-easter would get rich where anybody else would starve.
It was now the month of October. Ben proposed that they should be married; Sally should live with her mother during the winter, while he went on to the island, cut a freight of spars, dug a cellar before the ground froze, and made preparations for building in the spring. But Sally declared she would as lief have Ben at sea as have him on this island, running back and forth in the cold winter; that after a man had been at work a whole week, he didn’t want to pull a boat six miles, and be wet all through with spray; that there would be a great many days, when, if he was off, he could not get on, and if he was on, he could not get off, and there would be a great deal of time lost. Man and wife ought not to be separated; ’twas no way to live; she would go to the island and live with him.
“Live where, Sally?” inquired Ben.
“Why, with you. I suppose you will live somewhere—won’t you?”
“Well,” replied Ben, with a comical look at his great limbs, “I can live anywhere a Newfoundland dog can; but I shouldn’t want you to, nor should I consent to it. I expect to take some hands with me, build a half-faced cabin, good enough for us to live in, cut spars and timber, build a house next summer, and move in the fall.”
“It’ll cost you a good deal to build this house.”
“Why, yes. I can get the frame on the island, and the stuff for the boards and shingles. I shall have to buy bricks, and lime, and nails, and hire a joiner.”
“What does’t cost to build a log house?”
“Next to nothing, because we can build them of logs that are fit for nothing else.”