“I think you’ve got the right idea, captain,” murmured Filhiol. “Death, after all, is quite as natural a process, quite as much to be desired at the proper time, as life. I used to fear it, when I was young; but now I’m old, I’m not at all afraid. Are you?”
“Never! If I can only live to see Hal launched and off on his life journey, with colors flying and everything trig aloft and alow, I’ll be right glad to go. That’s what I’ve often told my wife and the others, sitting up there in the sunshine, smoking my pipe. You know, that’s where I go to smoke and think, doctor. Ezra goes too, and sometimes we take the old checkerboard and have a game or so. We take the telescopes and sextant up, too, and make observations there. It kind of scandalizes some of the stiff-necked old Puritans, but Lord love you! I don’t see any harm in it, do you? It all seems nice and sociable; it makes the death of my people seem only a kind of temporary going away, as if they’d gone on a visit, like, and as if Hal and Ezra and I were just waiting for ’em to come back.
“I tell you, doctor, it’s as homy and comfortable as anything you ever saw. I’m truly very happy, up there. Yes, in spite of everything, I reckon I’m a happy man. I’ve got no end of things to be thankful for. I’ve prospered. Best of all, the main thing without which, of course, everything else wouldn’t be worth a tinker’s dam, I’ve got my grandson, Hal!”
“I see. Tell me about him, captain.”
“I will. He’s been two years in college already, and he’s more than made good. He’s twenty-one, and got shoulders on him like Goliath. You ought to see him at work in the gym he’s fitted up in the barn! Oh, doctor, he’s a wonder! His rating is A1, all through.”
“I don’t doubt it. And you say he’s coming home to-day?”
“To-day—which makes this day a great, wonderful day for his old grandfather, and that’s the living truth. Yes, he’s coming home for as long as he’ll stay with me, though he’s got some idea of going out with the fishing-fleet, for what he calls local color. He’s quite a fellow to make up stories; says he wants to go to sea a while, so he can do it right. Though, Lord knows, he’s full enough of sea-lore and sea-skill. That’s his grandfather’s blood cropping out again, I suppose, that love for blue water. That’s what you call heredity, isn’t it, doctor?”
“H-m! yes, I suppose so,” answered Filhiol, frowning a little. “Though heredity’s peculiar. We don’t always know just what it is, or how it acts. Still, if a well-marked trait comes out in the offspring, we call it heredity. So he’s got your love of the sea, has he?”
“He surely has. There’s salt in his blood, all right enough!”
“H-m! You don’t notice any—any other traits in him that—remind you of your earlier days?”