This ranks with the epitaph at Nantucket:
“Think what a wife should be, and she was that!”
Another seafaring friend was, as so often happens, the last person whom you would ever connect with adventures, a little lady so tiny, so dainty, that a trip across the lawn with garden gloves and hat, to tie up her roses, might have been her longest excursion; but instead she has sailed round and round the world with her courtly sea-captain father, has lifted her quiet gray eyes to see coral islands and spice islands, and the strange mountain ranges of the East Indies.
“She wore white mostly when we were in the Trades or the Tropics,” her father has told me, “and she sat on deck all day, with her white fancy-work. She always seemed to like whatever was happening.”
One day, in a fog with a heavy sea running, the ship ran on a reef. The life-saving crew got the men off with great difficulty, but the Captain refused to leave his post, and little Miss Jessie refused too.
“No, thank you,” she said, in her soft voice, “No, thanks very much, I think I will stay with the Captain.”
“And you couldn’t move her,” he said, “any more than the rock of Gibraltar.”
With the night the storm lessened, and almost by a miracle the ship was got off safely next morning.
I must tell of one more seafaring couple, who lived down the river in a low white cottage where “Captain,” retired from service, could watch vessels passing, even without his handsome brass-bound binoculars, a much-prized tribute for life-saving.
The wife was long paralyzed, and the Captain, with the simple-minded nephew they had adopted, tended her as he might have tended an adored child. He bought her silk waists, fine aprons, little frills of one sort or another, fastened them on her with clumsy, loving fingers, and then would sit back, laughing with pride, while the paralyzed woman, with her wrecked face, managed to make uncouth sounds of pleasure.