CHAPTER VIII
SOMETHING ABOUT SALT WATER TAFFY
During the day Cap'n Amazon and Amiel Perdue carried Louise's trunks upstairs and into the storeroom, handy to her own chamber. It seems Cap'n Amazon had not brought his own sea chest; only a "dunnage bag," as he called it.
"But there's plenty of Abe's duds about," he said; "and we're about of a size."
When Louise went to unpack her trunks she found a number of things in the storeroom more interesting even than her own pretty summer frocks. There were shells, corals, sea-ivory—curios, such as are collected by seamen the world over. Cap'n Abe was an indefatigable gatherer of such wares. There was a green sea chest standing with its lid wide open, tarred rope handles on its ends, that may have been around the world a score of times. It was half filled with old books.
All the dusty, musty volumes in the chest seemed to deal with the sea and sea-going. Many of them, long since out of print and forgotten, recounted strange and almost unbelievable romances of nautical life—stories of wrecks, fires, battles with savages and pirates, discoveries of lone islands and marvelous explorations in lands which, since the date of publication, have become semi-civilized or altogether so.
Here were narratives of men who had sailed around the world in tiny craft like Captain Slocum; stories of seamen who had become chiefs of cannibal tribes, like the famous Larry O'Brien; several supposedly veracious narratives of the survivors of the Bounty; stories of Arctic and Antarctic discovery and privation. There were also several scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings of nautical wonders—many of these clipped from New Bedford and Newport papers which at one time were particularly rich in whalers' yarns.
Interested in skimming these wonderful stories, Lou Grayling spent most of the afternoon. Here was a fund of entertainment for rainy days—or wakeful nights, if she chanced to suffer such. She carried one of the scrapbooks into her bedroom that it might be under her hand if she desired such amusement.
In arranging her possessions in closet and bureau, she found no time on this first day at Cap'n Abe's store to stroll even as far as The Beaches; but the next morning she got up betimes, as soon as Cap'n Amazon himself was astir, dressed, and ran down and out of the open back door while her uncle was sweeping the store.
The sun was but then opening a red eye above the horizon. The ocean, away out to this line demarcating sea and sky, was perfectly flat. Unlike the previous dawn, this was as clear as a bell's note.