"Come, sir, give us a taste before we go up; it's master hot up there," said Chauncey, who was nothing if not convivial; and the three men drank solemnly in turn from the smallest of the four pitchers; then Mr. Packer stooped again to replenish it.
"Whatever become o' that petition?" whispered Chauncey; but Joe Banks gave him a warning push with his elbow. "Wish ye merry Christmas!" said Chauncey unexpectedly to some one who called him from the stairhead.
"Hold that light nearer," said Mr. Packer. "Come, Joe, I ain't goin' to hear no more o' that nonsense about me beatin' off old Ferris." He had been king of his Christmas company upstairs, but down here he was a little ashamed.
"Land! there's the fiddle," said Chauncey. "Le' 's hurry up;" and the three cup-bearers hastened back up the cellar-stairs to the scene of festivity.
The two Christmas trees, the landmark pines, stood tall and strong on the hill looking down at the shining windows of the house. There was a sound like a summer wind in their tops; the bright moon and the stars were lighting them, and all the land and sea, that Christmas night.
All My Sad Captains.
I.
Mrs. Peter Lunn was a plump little woman who bobbed her head like a pigeon when she walked. Her best dress was a handsome, if not new, black silk which Captain Lunn, her lamented husband, had bought many years before in the port of Bristol. The decline of shipping interests had cost this worthy shipmaster not only the better part of his small fortune, but also his health and spirits; and he had died a poor man at last, after a long and trying illness. Such a lingering disorder, with its hopes and despairs, rarely affords the same poor compensations to a man that it does to a woman; the claims upon public interest and consideration, the dignity of being assailed by any ailment out of the common course—all these things are to a man but the details of his general ignominy and impatience.
Captain Peter Lunn may have indulged in no sense of his own consequence and uniqueness as an invalid; but his wife bore herself as a woman should who was the heroine in so sad a drama, and she went and came across the provincial stage, knowing that her audience was made up of nearly the whole population of that little seaside town. When the curtain had fallen at last, and the old friends—seafaring men and others and their wives—had come home from Captain Lunn's funeral, and had spoken their friendly thoughts, and reviewed his symptoms for what seemed to them to be the last time, everybody was conscious of a real anxiety. The future of the captain's widow was sadly uncertain, for every one was aware that Mrs. Lunn could now depend upon only a scant provision. She was much younger than her husband, having been a second wife, and she was thrifty and ingenious; but her outlook was acknowledged to be anything but cheerful. In truth, the honest grief that she displayed in the early days of her loss was sure to be better understood with the ancient proverb in mind, that a lean sorrow is hardest to bear.