But grandpa, Glory, and Bo’sn had the long delightful mornings at home and together; and this day, as usual, their talk turned upon the dream of their lives–“Sailors’ Snug Harbor.”
“Now, grandpa, talk. Tell how ’tis. Do it fast an’ picturey-like, ’less I never can guess how to make this piece do. It’s such a little patch an’ such a awful big hole! Posy Jane gets carelesser an’ carelesser all the time. This very last week that ever was she tore this jacket again. An’ I told her, I said: ‘Jane, if you don’t look out you’ll never wear this coat all next winter nohow.’ An’ she up an’ laughed, just like she didn’t mind a thing like that. An’ she paid me ten whole centses, she did. But I love her. Jane’s so good to everybody, to every single body. Ain’t she, grandpa?”
“Aye, aye, deary. I cal’late she done it a purpose. She makes her money easy, Jane does. Just sets there on the bridge-end and sells second-hand flowers to whoever’ll buy. If she had to walk the streets—”
Glory was so surprised by this last sentence that she snapped her thread off in the wrong place and wasted a whole needleful. Until yesterday, she had never heard her grandfather speak in any but the most contented spirit about his lot in life. Then he had twice lamented that he “didn’t know whatever was to become o’ two poor creatur’s like them,” and now, again, this gay morning, he was complaining–almost complaining. Glory didn’t feel, in the least, like a “poor creatur’.” She felt as “chirpy as a sparrow bird,” over in City Hall park; and, if the sun didn’t shine in the Lane, she knew it was shining in the street beyond, so what mattered?
Vaguely disturbed, the child laid her hand on his arm and asked, “Be you sick, grandpa?”
He answered promptly and testily, “Sick? No, nor never was in my life. Nothin’ but blind an’ that’s a trifle compared to sickness. What you askin’ for? Didn’t I eat my breakfast clean up?”
“Ye-es, but–but afterward you–you kicked Bo’sn, an’ sayin’ that about ‘walkin’ the street’ just a singin’; why, I thought you liked it. I know the folks like to hear you. You do roll out that about the ‘briny wave’ just grand. I wish you’d sing it to Bo’sn an’ me right now, grandpa, dear.”
Wholly mollified and ashamed of his own ill-temper, the captain tried the familiar tune but it died in his throat. Music was far beyond him just then, yet he stroked the child’s head tenderly, and said, “Some other time, mate, some other time. I’m a little hoarse, maybe, or somethin’.”
“Well, then, never mind. Let’s talk ‘Snug Harbor.’ You begin. You tell an’ I’ll put in what I’m mind to; or I’ll say what I guess it’s like an’ you set me straight if I get crooked. ’Cause you’ve seen it, grandpa, an’ I never have. Not once; not yet. Bime-by— Oh, shall I begin, shall I, grandpa?”
The sailor sighed fit to shake the whole small tenement and nodded in consent; so, observing nothing of his reluctance to their once favorite subject, Glory launched forth: