We therefore decided to retain Christopher and the Swallow, although the price, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, seemed rather high.
“We do not need Christopher,” she said, “but if we must take him with the boat we must. He can chop wood and so on.”
We spent the next day getting settled. The island was a small one, with only a few fishermen’s houses on it, and Tish drew a sigh of relief.
“No man except Christopher,” she said to me. “And she detests him. And who can be small in the presence of the Atlantic Ocean? She will go back a different girl, Lizzie. Already she is less selfish. I heard her tell Hannah to-night, referring to Christopher, to ‘feed the brute well.’ There was true thoughtfulness behind that.”
Christopher, of course, ate in the kitchen.
It was the next morning that Tish called him in from the woodpile and asked him about the size of codfish.
“Codfish?” he said. “Well, now, I reckon they’d run a pound or so.”
“A pound or so?” Tish demanded indignantly. “There is one in the natural history museum at home that must weigh sixty pounds.”
“Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re talking about museum pieces, there are whales around here that weigh pretty considerable. But you take the run of cod, the oil variety, and you get ’em all sizes. Depends on their age,” he added.
Tish says that she knew then that he was no fisherman, but it was not for several days that he told her his story.