"And mebbe a few o' them fancy skylights and brass rails off her deck, too," said Big Bill.
"Maybe. But I'd like to had her tried out, just the same."
Tied up to the other side of Long Wharf when we got in was Tom O'Brien's vessel. Big Bill, like a good gossip, waddled over to get the news, and soon came galloping back.
"She's gone!" he called out, and showed us a Boston paper with the report of how four men's bodies with a life-preserver marked Henriette had been picked up off Nantucket the day before. There was also the story in a New York paper of how a big ocean liner had been in the storm. She was six hundred foot long and bound for New York. There was a bishop aboard, and when it got too rough for the passengers, some of them wrote notes to the bishop asking him to hold a prayer-meeting in the saloon. He started to hold the prayer-meeting but it grew too rough. They had to quit.
"And they in good deep water where they were! I wonder what they'd 'a' thought if they'd been in this little one and where she was?" said Tom Haile.
"Maybe they'd held the prayer-meetin' anyway, then," said Shorty.
We had come away from the Henriette in only our oilskins and trousers and undershirts. Tom Haile and Tom O'Brien and a couple of fish-buyers on Long Wharf started a collection to get us some clothes. We took the money up Thames Street to some clothing dealer who was a brother Moccasin to Tom Haile and O'Brien. But belonging to the same order didn't make any difference. The clothing dealer wouldn't take a cent off.
"Not even for shipwrecked seamen?" asked O'Brien.
"Being shipwrecked seamen don't make the clothes cost any less to me," said the dealer.
"A hell of a fine brother Moccasin you are!" said O'Brien.