A Message From the Sea | Page 5

and through him too, as he sat at his work between
two little windows,--with one eye microscopically on the geological
formation of that part of Devonshire, and the other telescopically on the
open sea,--the two climbed high up the village, and stopped before a
quaint little house, on which was painted, "MRS. RAYBROCK,
DRAPER;" and also "POST-OFFICE." Before it, ran a rill of
murmuring water, and access to it was gained by a little plank-bridge.
"Here's the name," said Captain Jorgan, "sure enough. You can come in
if you like, Tom."
The captain opened the door, and passed into an odd little shop, about
six feet high, with a great variety of beams and bumps in the ceiling,
and, besides the principal window giving on the ladder of stones, a
purblind little window of a single pane of glass, peeping out of an

abutting corner at the sun-lighted ocean, and winking at its brightness.
"How do you do, ma'am?" said the captain. "I am very glad to see you.
I have come a long way to see you."
"Have you, sir? Then I am sure I am very glad to see you, though I
don't know you from Adam."
Thus a comely elderly woman, short of stature, plump of form,
sparkling and dark of eye, who, perfectly clean and neat herself, stood
in the midst of her perfectly clean and neat arrangements, and surveyed
Captain Jorgan with smiling curiosity. "Ah! but you are a sailor, sir,"
she added, almost immediately, and with a slight movement of her
hands, that was not very unlike wringing them; "then you are heartily
welcome."
"Thank'ee, ma'am," said the captain, "I don't know what it is, I am sure;
that brings out the salt in me, but everybody seems to see it on the
crown of my hat and the collar of my coat. Yes, ma'am, I am in that
way of life."
"And the other gentleman, too," said Mrs. Raybrock.
"Well now, ma'am," said the captain, glancing shrewdly at the other
gentleman, "you are that nigh right, that he goes to sea,--if that makes
him a sailor. This is my steward, ma'am, Tom Pettifer; he's been a'most
all trades you could name, in the course of his life,-- would have
bought all your chairs and tables once, if you had wished to sell
'em,--but now he's my steward. My name's Jorgan, and I'm a
ship-owner, and I sail my own and my partners' ships, and have done so
this five-and-twenty year. According to custom I am called Captain
Jorgan, but I am no more a captain, bless your heart, than you are."
"Perhaps you'll come into my parlour, sir, and take a chair?" said Mrs.
Raybrock.
"Ex-actly what I was going to propose myself, ma'am. After you."
Thus replying, and enjoining Tom to give an eye to the shop, Captain
Jorgan followed Mrs. Raybrock into the little, low back-room,--
decorated with divers plants in pots, tea-trays, old china teapots, and
punch-bowls,--which was at once the private sitting-room of the
Raybrock family and the inner cabinet of the post-office of the village
of Steepways.
"Now, ma'am," said the captain, "it don't signify a cent to you where I
was born, except--" But here the shadow of some one entering fell upon

the captain's figure, and he broke off to double himself up, slap both his
legs, and ejaculate, "Never knew such a thing in all my life! Here he is
again! How are you?"
These words referred to the young fellow who had so taken Captain
Jorgan's fancy down at the pier. To make it all quite complete he came
in accompanied by the sweetheart whom the captain had detected
looking over the wall. A prettier sweetheart the sun could not have
shone upon that shining day. As she stood before the captain, with her
rosy lips just parted in surprise, her brown eyes a little wider open than
was usual from the same cause, and her breathing a little quickened by
the ascent (and possibly by some mysterious hurry and flurry at the
parlour door, in which the captain had observed her face to be for a
moment totally eclipsed by the Sou'wester hat), she looked so charming,
that the captain felt himself under a moral obligation to slap both his
legs again. She was very simply dressed, with no other ornament than
an autumnal flower in her bosom. She wore neither hat nor bonnet, but
merely a scarf or kerchief, folded squarely back over the head, to keep
the sun off,-- according to a fashion that may be sometimes seen in the
more genial parts of England as well as of Italy, and which is probably
the first fashion of head-dress that came into the world when grasses
and leaves went out.
"In my country,"