“Oh, Breeze, my dear boy! my comfort! Is there not something else you can do? A clerkship would pay just as well, and there would be none of the horrible danger.”
“Don’t, mother! don’t urge it! It makes me heart-sick to think of a desk, or of being shut up all day in a store. I should never be good for anything, you know I wouldn’t, mother dear, trying to do work that I had no heart in.”
“But, Breeze--”
“But, mother! Please don’t think any more about a clerkship. Give me your consent and your blessing, and let me follow father’s calling and gain a living from the sea, as he has done. I came to you from the sea, you know,” he continued, with a winning smile, and patting her thin cheeks. “It was kind to me then, and it always will be, I am sure.”
After many talks of this kind Breeze carried his point. Then, one evening in March, there was no prouder boy in town than he, when he was able to announce to his mother that he had shipped for a mackerelling trip to the southward, on the schooner Curlew.
The vessel was already taking in her ice and stores, and would haul out into the stream the next morning, ready to start. Breeze was to go over to town the first thing after breakfast, and buy the oil-skin suit, rubber boots, and woollen cap that, besides the canvas bag of heavy clothing he would take from home, would form his outfit. These he would send aboard the schooner. Then he would come home again and say good-by if there was time--but perhaps there would not be, and so they had better make the most of this evening.
They did make the most of it, and until after ten o’clock, Breeze and his mother sat hand in hand, and talked, she sadly and tearfully, he bravely and hopefully.
The next morning, just before he left, his mother called him into her room, saying, “I have one more thing to give you, Breeze. It is something that should be the most precious thing in the world to you, and I want you to wear it always.” With this she took from the sandalwood box, that had kept it safely all these years, the slender chain and golden ball that had hung around his baby neck when she first held him in her arms.
Breeze was inclined to laugh at the idea of wearing a gold chain and a locket around his neck; but his mother was so in earnest in her desire that he should, that he promised to do as she wished.
