“Well, now, we didn’t expect to speak any pieces,” Mrs. Carey answered, her pleasant motherly face beaming around at them with love and kindliness. She used to say that she’d got so in the habit of mothering the two children and the Captain that it was just second nature to her to mother anything in sight. “I don’t know any poetry, and neither does Nancy, but if you like I’ll read you something that we think’s the finest poetry ever was written about the sea, and then Nancy can sing her favorite hymn, ‘Pull for the Shore.’”
She stepped back into the kitchen and spoke to Aunty Welcome, and presently returned with the latter’s Bible in her hand. Sitting there in the cool, cosy room, whose windows all opened to the sea, she read that beautiful Psalm that both she and the Captain loved to read aloud, the One Hundred and Fourth, with its grand old song about He “who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds His chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind: who maketh His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire.”
Then Nancy’s clear, sweet voice fairly made the little room ring with the hymn she loved:
“Light in the darkness, sailor,
Day is at hand,
See o’er the foaming billow,
Fair haven land.”
After it was over, and they had all gone excepting the yacht club girls themselves, Crullers said she thought it was the happiest time she had ever had, and the next day she was able to “rise and shine,” as Aunty Welcome told her, and take up life again.
Things were very quiet at the island for a week after the mishap in the bay. The girls restricted their sailing to the west end of the bay, down towards Fair Havens, and Polly was busy finding out how to manage yachts, keep them in repair, and so on, and she called Tom to account roundly.
“Just look at these seams in the Tidy Jane, Tom,” she said one day, when they were down at the landing overhauling the boats. “Don’t they need re-caulking?”