[GARLANDS FOR PETTIPAW]
GARLANDS FOR PETTIPAW
Towns, like persons, I suppose, wake up now and then to find themselves famous; but I doubt if any town having this experience could be more amazed by it, more dazed by it, than was Three Rivers, one day last March, when we opened our newspapers from Boston and Montreal and lo, there was our own name staring at us from the front page! Three Rivers is in the Province of Quebec, on the shore of the Bay de Chaleurs; but we receive our metropolitan papers every day, only thirty-six hours off the presses; and this makes us feel closely in touch with the outside world. Until the railroad from Matapedia came through, four years ago, mail was brought by stage, every second day. The coming of the railroad had seemed an important event then; but it had never put Three Rivers on the front page of the Boston Herald.
The news-item in question was to the effect that the S. S. Maid of the North, Captain Pettipaw of Three Rivers, P. Q., had been torpedoed, forty miles off Fastnet, while en route from Sydney, N. S., to Liverpool, with a cargo of pig-iron. The captain and crew (said the item) had been allowed to take to the boats; but only one of the two boats had been heard from. That one was in command of the mate, and had been rescued by a trawler.
Captain Pettipaw of Three Rivers! Our Captain Pettipaw! How well we knew him; and who among us had ever thought of him as one likely to make Three Rivers figure on the front page of the world's news! Yet this had come to pass; and even amid the anxiety we felt as to the fate of Captain Joe, we could but be agreeably conscious of the distinction that had come to our little community. All that afternoon poor Mrs. Pettipaw's house was thronged with neighbors who hurried over there, newspaper in hand, ready to congratulate or to condole as might seem most called for.
"Poor Mrs. Pettipaw" or "poor Melina" was the way we always spoke of her, partly, I suppose, because of her nine children, and partly because—I hesitate to say it—she was Captain Joe's wife. But now that it seemed so very likely she might be his widow, our hearts went out to her the more. You see Captain Joe was, in our local phrase, "one of those Pettipaws." Pettipaws never seemed to get anywhere or to do anything that mattered. Pettipaws were always behindhand. Pettipaws were always in trouble, one way or another. It was a family characteristic.
Only five or six years ago Captain Joe's new schooner, the Melina P., had broken from her harbor moorings under a sudden gale from the northwest and driven square on the Fiddle Reef, where she foundered before our eyes. Other vessels were anchored close by the Melina P.; but not one of them broke loose. All the Captain's savings for years and years had gone into the new schooner, not to speak of several hundreds borrowed from his fellow-townsmen.