But he was not thinking of his grandniece as he walked off to prowl among the dunes; he was philosophizing about girlhood in general. “Girls, even the best of ’em, are freakish. You can’t understand ’em,” he told his masculine old heart. “They cut queer capers, sometimes, just like a vessel! Now, what was the Morning-Glory one doing to-day, sitting an’ looking at herself in that pane o’ glass on her lap—an’ running off without a word as if I caught her, or came near catching her, in a crime? Her eyes looked red, too, when next I met her. And there’s nothing to cry over in her looks; she’s pretty as her name-flower. But”—soliloquizing further to a silvery birch-log, part of the driftwood scattered everywhere among the dunes, as he notched it with his pocket-knife, to test its suitability for a spinner or guessing-top—“but it’s hard for a girl like her to lose both parents before she’s seventeen, to have no regular home an’ no money, be dependent for a while on those who are no kin, as I believe’s the case!”
Meditating thus upon the invisible storm and stress that might beset even a girl’s life set Captain Andy crooning about the actual storms amid which his life had been spent as he bore the birch-log to his watchman’s tent upon the beach, to saw off a foot of it for a revolving top.
“If howling winds and roaring seas
Give proof of coming danger ...”
he sang, broke off and took up the song again on the farther side of a mumbled gap as he commenced his whittling:
“When perils gather round
All sense of danger’s drowned,
We despise it to a man!
We sing a little and laugh a little
And work a little an’ play a little