“But it will do, Ben; you’ve just said that a log house was warm and comfortable.”
“Indeed it is,” chimed in the old lady, who, with her spectacles above her cap, and her hands upon her knees, sat leaning forward, her whole soul in her face, while the favorite cat, who for twenty years had spent the evening in her patron’s lap, stood with one paw upon her mistress’s knee, and the other uplifted with an air of astonishment at being prevented from securing her accustomed place,—“indeed it is. Mother used to say this house never began to be so warm or so tight as the old log house.”
“O, dear, Sally!” exclaimed Ben, greatly troubled; “I thought ’twas bad enough to take you on to the island to live at all, and now you insist on living in a log house. What will folks say? They will say, there’s Sally Hadlock, that might have had her pick of the likeliest fellows in town, and never have had to bring the water to wash her hands, has taken up with Ben Rhines, and gone to live in a log shanty on Elm Island.”
“Look here, Ben,” replied Sally; “suppose my father had been a fisherman, and lived on Elm Island; wouldn’t you have come on there and lived with me, though all the young fellows in town had said, There’s Ben Rhines, that might have been master of as fine a ship as ever swum, has taken up with old Hadlock’s daughter, and gone to live on Elm Island?”
“To be sure I would.”
“Well, then,” said Sally, coloring, “I hope you don’t want me to say, right here before mother, that I’d rather live on Elm Island, in a log house, with the boy I love, than with the best of them in a palace. I want to bring the water to wash my hands. I don’t believe that God made us to be idle, or that we are any happier for being so.”
“That’s right,” shouted the old lady, in ecstasies, rising up and kissing her daughter’s cheek; “that’s the old-fashioned sort of love, that will wear and make happiness, and it’s all the thing on this earth that will; it will bear trial; it is a fast color, and won’t fade out in washing. Most young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers left off, and they end with running out all that their fathers left them. You’re willing to begin and cut your garment according to your cloth, and you will prosper accordingly.”
CHAPTER VII.
CAPTAIN RHINES RIDING OUT A GALE BEFORE THE FIRE.
The morning succeeding Ben’s return from Boston gave tokens of a coming storm.