"This here little house was my father's before me," continued Timothy, as if talking to himself, "and man and boy I've never lived elsewhere, though when I was a little lad there were two fine fields between us and the cliff. I was always a running to the edge to watch the tide, it fair bewitched me to see it come creeping up and then backing away, day in, day out, like some mighty living thing with a living breathing heart. And when I got a bit older, that there sea made a fisher of me. Summer and winter it gave me my daily bread; it never failed me yet. The sea's been a rare good friend to me from the one end of life to t'other; a rare good friend it's been. It'll not go back on me now, it won't. 'Twould be a mean trick to play on me, it would, if it took the old place from under my feet, after four and ninety years of good fellowship! I'm not afraid of the Tide."
Mrs. Power knew not what to say. No arguments rose to her lips, though she vainly longed to remonstrate.
"Well, Timothy," she said at last, "I can't say that I'm as well acquainted with the ways of the tide as you are, but the other of your friends that you seem so sure of, I have often heard mentioned as the great Enemy."
Timothy's face lit up with a triumphant smile as he raised one hand and pointed upwards.
"And why?--I reckon it's because they don't understand. I thought that once myself, but I see clearer now. The Tide's a good friend, but Death's better."
"How did you find that out, Timothy?" questioned Mrs. Power.
"It was many a long year ago now," was the reply. "The old clergyman's sister, Miss Alice, she was a good one, she was, and she would have us young chaps up at the big house to learn us summat when the winter nights did come, and the sea was too rough for the fishing. She was always for book learning, was Miss Alice.
"'Don't go and waste your life, lad,' she would say, 'thinking it's enough to feed the poor body; 'stead of that, do something for the soul too.'
"It's dead and buried she's been this long while now, but she comes back to me plain, she do, my eyes they seem to see her sitting there yet, same as I saw her last, the week before she died. She sent for me, she did, seeing I was one of her old scholars, to tell me she was going home, and to bid me take more thought for heaven. She was always a wonderful kind teacher, was Miss Alice, and her face fair shone when she spoke of God and the golden city.
"That evening she was sitting by the fire, and on the wall just behind her was a big picter. Well--that picter it transfixed me wholly; it stuck in my mind, it did, I have it before me now, as plain as a pikestaff."