And he has grown up since then. And he is worthy.
[CHAPTER XLII]
In Which the Tale Comes to a Good End: Archie and Billy Make Ready for Dinner, Toby Farr is Taken for Good and All by Sir Archibald, and Billy Topsail, Having Been Declared Wrong by Archie's Father, Takes the Path That Leads to a New Shingle, After Which the Author Asks a Small Favour of the Reader
Well, now, we have come to the end of the tale of Billy Topsail. I need not describe the grief of the Colony when the tragedy of the ice-floes was disclosed. Newfoundlanders are warm-hearted folk; they are easily touched to sympathy—they grieved, indeed, even to the remotest harbours, when news of the death of the men of the Rough and Tumble was spread forth. It was a catastrophe that impended every sealing season—rare, perhaps, in its degree, but forever a thing to be expected. Yet you are not to think of Newfoundland in visions wholly of wind and snow and ice. Newfoundland is not an Arctic country by any means. Nor does the wind blow all the while; nor is the sea all the while in a turmoil. It is a lovely coast after all; and the folk who live there are simple, self-respecting, cheerful—a lovable, admirable folk. To be sure they have summer weather. What is written in this book is of the spring of the year—the tempestuous season, with the ice breaking up. As a matter of fact, Newfoundland seems to me, in retrospect, to be far less a land of tempest and frost than of sunlit hills and a rippling blue sea.
Ashore, at last, and making ready for dinner, in Sir Archibald Armstrong's great house, while Archie's mother mothered little Toby Farr, who was to live in the great house thereafter, and be reared by Sir Archibald, like a brother of Archie's own—alone in Archie's rooms, Billy and Archie talked a little while.
"Somehow, Archie," said Billy, with a puzzled frown, "it didn't seem nothin' much t' do at the time."
"What, Billy?"
"What Jonathan done."