He had been a sailor. Uncle Joe had been more than a sailor—he had been pilot and smuggler. He had commanded ships of eight hundred tons burthen, full of East Indian commodities, and he had commanded luggers of twenty tons burthen, deep with contraband goods, gunwale flush with teas, brandies, laces, tobacco, and hollands. Uncle Joe had been a good friend to me when I was a lad and an orphan. He and his wife were as father and mother to me, and I loved them both with all the love that was in my heart. It was Uncle Joe who had educated me, who had bred me to the sea, who saw when I started on a voyage that I embarked with plenty of clothes in my chest and plenty of money in my pocket; and to Uncle Joe’s influence it was that I looked for a valuable East or West Indian command in the next or the following year.
I pulled the house-bell and hammered with the knocker. It was dark among the trees; the house stood black, with a dim red square of window, where some crimson curtains shut out the lamplight. Until the door was opened I listened to the weather. All was hushed save the thunder. I could hear the faint, remote beat of the surf upon the shingle, that was all. Not a leaf rustled overhead; but though there was not more lightning, the thunder was more frequent down in the south, as though the clouds over France were blazing bravely.
A middle-aged man, clad somewhat after the manner of the longshoremen of those days—clearly a decayed or retired mariner—pulled open the door, and, as this was done, I heard my uncle call out:
“Is it Bill?”
“It is,” said I, delighted to hear his voice; and I pushed past the sailor who held open the door.
My uncle came out of the parlor into the passage, looked up and down me a moment or two, and extending his hand, greeted me thus:
“Well, I’m junked!”
He then shook my hand at least a minute, and bidding me fling my cap on to a hall chair, he dragged me into the parlor—the snuggest room in world, as I have often thought; full of good paintings of ships and the sea, of valuable curiosities, and fine oak furniture.
Every age has faces of its own, countenances which exactly fit the civilization of the particular time they belong to. It is no question of the fashion of the beard or the wearing of the hair. There was a type of face in my young day which I rarely behold now, and I dare say the type which I am every day seeing will be as extinct fifty years hence as is the type that I recollect when I was a young man. How is this, and why is this? It matters not. It may be due to frequent new infusions of blood; to the modifications—do not call it the progress—of intellect; it may be due—but to whatever it may be due it is true; and equally true it is that my Uncle Joe had one of those faces—I may indeed say one of those heads—which as peculiarly belong to their time as the fashions of garments belong to theirs.
He was clean shaven; his temples were overshot; they set his little black eyes back deep, and his baldness, co-operating with these thatched and overhanging eaves, provided him with so broad a surface of forehead that he might have sat for the portrait of a great wit. My uncle had a wide and firm mouth; the lips were slightly blue: but this color was not due to the use of ardent spirits—oh, no! A teetotaler he was not, but never would the mugs he emptied have changed the color of his lips. They were blue because his heart was not strong, and the few who remember him know that he died of heart disease.