Give me, with sparing hands, but moderate wealth,
A little honour, and enough of health;
Free from the busy city life,
Near shady groves and purling streams confined,
A faithful friend, a pleasing wife;
And give me all in one, give a contented mind."
Anonymous.
Mark and Bridget remained at the Reef a week, entirely alone. To them the time seemed but a single day; and so completely were they engrossed with each other, and their present happiness, that they almost dreaded the hour of return. Everything was visited, however, even to the abandoned anchor, and Mark made a trip to the eastward, carrying his wife out into the open water, in that direction. But the ship and the crater gave Bridget the greatest happiness. Of these she never tired, though the first gave her the most pleasure. A ship was associated with all her earliest impressions of Mark; on board that very ship she had been married; and now it formed her home, temporarily, if not permanently. Bridget had been living so long beneath a tent, and in savage huts, that the accommodations of the Rancocus appeared like those of a palace. They were not inelegant even, though it was not usual, in that period of the republic, to fit up vessels with a magnificence little short of royal yachts, as is done at present. In the way of convenience, however, our ship could boast of a great deal. Her cabins were on deck, or under a poop, and consequently enjoyed every advantage of light and air. Beneath were store-rooms, still well supplied with many articles of luxury, though time was beginning to make its usual inroads on their qualities. The bread was not quite as sound as it was once, nor did the teas retain all their strength and flavour. But the sugar was just as sweet as the day it was shipped, and in the coffee there was no apparent change. Of the butter, we do not choose to say anything. Bridget, in the prettiest manner imaginable, declared that as soon as she could set Dido at work the store-rooms should be closely examined, and thoroughly cleaned. Then the galley made such a convenient and airy kitchen! Mark had removed the house, the awning answering every purpose, and his wife declared that it was a pleasure to cook a meal for him, in so pleasant a place.
The first dish Bridget ever literally cooked for Mark, with her own hands, or indeed for any one else, was a mess of 'grass,' as it was the custom of even the most polished people of America then to call asparagus. They had gone together to the asparagus bed on Loam Island, and had found the plant absolutely luxuriating in its favourite soil. The want of butter was the greatest defect in this mess, for, to say the truth, Bridget refused the ship's butter on this occasion, but luckily, enough oil remained to furnish a tolerable substitute. Mark declared he had never tasted anything in his life half so good!
At the end of the week, the governor, as Heaton had styled Mark, and as Bridget had begun playfully to term him, gave the opinion that it was necessary for them to tear themselves away from their paradise. Never before, most certainly, had the Reef appeared to the young husband a spot as delightful as he now found it, and it did seem to him very possible for one to pass a whole life on it without murmuring. His wife again and again assured him she had never before been half as happy, and that, much as she loved Anne and the baby, she could remain a month longer, without being in the least wearied. But it was prudent to return to the Peak, for Mark had never felt his former security against foreign invasion, since he was acquainted with the proximity of peopled islands.