“Ben's growing,” says my father, hoarsely.
“You'll not remember it against me, Ben, for it was not I. And he shall go to sea, Tom, remember, like all the Bensons and Crees, all sailing folk and proud to be, proud to be all sailing folk. But I'm glad you're not a woman, Ben, for the sea's hard on women, very hard.” When I went to school in the brick schoolhouse on Willet Street I studied Latin in a green-covered book of selections, which for the most part I greatly disliked. There was a passage ending with these words, “sunt lacrimæ rerum”; and what “lacrimæ rerum” means I find less easy to say in common English than I did then, when we called it “the tears of things,” and appeared to satisfy the master with that. But now I suppose it might mean, there is a hidden sorrow in the middle of God's universe that likely has been there always. However it may be, I suppose it quite beyond a plain man to describe his idea of the matter. But whenever I think of those words, “lacrimæ rerum,” they sound to me as if spoken in my mother's voice, sighing, plaintive, and moving away from me; or as if she might have meant the same thing in saying, “The sea's hard on women, very hard.”
The wind blew the curtain in so that it wavered in the room. “Lacrimæ rerum. The sea's hard on women,” a kind of sighing sound that moved far and far away.
It was now come to the latter part of November, and about the middle of a certain morning I heard Tony calling my name. At my coming he winked in a manner to make me think he knew all about something, only that he always winked to show his knowingness, whether he knew anything or not. He pointed with his thumb to the door of the inn parlour, where I went in, and found my father sitting with the three strangers.
Their names, as I came to hear them, were these: the eldest, Captain Cavarly; the odd-looking one, Mr. Dan Morgan; and the third, Mr. Sabre Calhoun—a curious name, and he was tall and thin, and, like his name, not to be quickly forgotten. Indeed, he was a man I never understood, and, seeing that I came to have such chances of knowing him as do not commonly fall between men, there must have been something odd with him or with me. He had sandy hair, and grey eyes that seemed very lively and shrewd.
“I make you acquainted with these gentlemen,” said my father, “if the captain don't mind your hearing his yarn.”
“Shuly,” said he, with a fine wave of his hand. “Glad to know you.”
Mr. Calhoun nodded.
“Why, why,” said Mr. Morgan, looking at my red cheeks. “You ain't got any liver complaint. Well, sir, when I was so old I used to bust the seams o' my clo'es, an' it hurt my feelins te'ible. I grew like a yellow punkin, ve'y similar.”
The captain went on with the story, which my coming had interrupted.