Eli | Page 3

net, engaged upon some handiwork which two little girls
were watching. Close by him lay a setter, his nose between his paws.
Occasionally the man raised his eyes to scan the sea.
"There's Joel," he said, "comin' in around the Bar. Not much air stirrin'
now!"
Then he turned to his work again.
"First, you go so fash'," he said to the children, as he drew a thread;
"then you go so fash'."
And as he worked he made a great show of labor, much to their
diversion.

But the sight of Joel's broad white sail had not brought pleasant
thoughts to his mind; for Joel had hailed him, off the Shoal, the
afternoon before, and had obligingly offered to buy his fish right there,
and so let him go directly home, omitting to mention that sudden jump
of price due to an empty market.
"Wonder what poor man he 's took a dollar out of to-day! Well, I s'pose
it's all right: those that 's got money, want money."
"What be you, Eli--ganging on hooks?" said Aunt Patience, as she
tiptoed into the kitchen behind him, from his wife's sick-room, and
softly closed the door after her.
"No," said the elder of the children; "he 's mending our stockings, and
showing me how."
"Well, you do have a hard time, don't you?" said Aunt Patience,
looking down over his shoulder; "to slave and tug and scrape to get a
house over your head, and then to have to turn square 'round, and stay
to home with a sick woman, and eat all into it with mortgages!"
"Oh, well," he said, "we 'll fetch, somehow."
Aunt Patience went to the glass, and holding a black pin in her mouth,
carefully tied the strings of her sun-bonnet.
"Anyway," she says, "you take it good-natured. Though if there is one
thing that's harder than another, it is to be good-natured all the time,
without being aggravating. I have known men that was so awfully
good-natured that they was harder to live with than if they was cross!"
And without specifying further, she opened her plaid parasol and
stepped out at the porch.
Though, on this quiet afternoon of Saturday, the peace of the
approaching Sabbath seemed already brooding over the little dwelling,
peace had not lent her hand to the building of the home. Every foot of
land, every shingle, every nail, had been wrung from the reluctant sea.

Every voyage had contributed something. It was a great day when Eli
was able to buy the land. Then, between two voyages, he dug a cellar
and laid a foundation; then he saved enough to build the main part of
the cottage and to finish the front room, lending his own hand to the
work. Then he used to get letters at every port, telling of progress,--how
Lizzie, his wife, had adorned the front room with a bright ninepenny
paper, of which a little piece was enclosed,--which he kept as a sort of
charm about him and exhibited to his friends; how she and her little
brother had lathed the entry and the kitchen, and how they had set out
blackberry vines from the woods. Then another letter told of a surprise
awaiting him on his return; and, in due time, coming home as third
mate from Hong-Kong to a seaman's tumultuous welcome, he had
found that a great, good-natured mason, with whose sick child his wife
had watched night after night, had appeared one day with lime and hair
and sand, and in white raiment, and had plastered the entry and the
kitchen, and finished a room upstairs.
And so, for years, at home and on the sea, at New York and at
Valparaiso and in the Straits of Malacca, the little house and the little
family within it had grown into the fibre of Eli's heart. Nothing had
given him more delight than to meet, in the strange streets of Calcutta
or before the Mosque of Omar, some practical Yankee from Stonington
or Machias, and, whittling to discuss with him, among the turbans of
the Orient, the comparative value of shaved and of sawed shingles, or
the economy of "Swedes-iron" nails, and to go over with him the
estimates and plans which he had worked out in his head under all the
constellations of the skies.
The supper things were cleared away. The children had said good-night
and gone to bed, and Eli had been sitting for an hour by his wife's
bedside. He had had to tax his patience and ingenuity heavily during
the long months that she had lain there to entertain her for a little while
in the evening, after his hard, wet day's work. He had been talking now
of the coming week, when he was to serve upon