clerks put in their account-books that kept my business goin'. There
were those who said that I'd pay the price some day for tryin' to carry
so many things in my head, but small heed I paid to them--and 'twasn't
in those days my memory dimmed.

There was but little damage to the yacht's bottom--a small matter to
find that out--though the skipper he carried was no master of craft.
So many of them like that, too. To face the sea like men is not
what they're after, not to take winter or summer as it comes, rough
or smooth--no--but always the smooth water and soft winds. But
he did not sail for the West Indies that day, nor that week, nor
winter--something'd gone wrong with the machinery. No concern of mine
that. There were those who said later--but that was when my head begun
to trouble me--as it does now sometimes, as I said. There was a time,
when Sarah was alive, before we had even the old ship's cabin on the end
of the old dock by way of an office, when I carried my business in a
wallet in my breast pocket--that is, what we didn't carry in our
heads--but the mother of those two lads, she was with me then. That's
long ago.

A most interestin' man he was. As I say, he made no West India cruise
that winter--the machinery kept gettin' out of order--but he made a few
trips with me--wreckin' trips--for I still looked after the big jobs
myself. There were those who used to say that if I'd only learned to
stand by and look on long enough to train a good man to take my place
in the deep divin', that I'd be goin' yet. Maybe so, but maybe, too,
they didn't know it all. I'd yet to meet a man who would do my work half
as well as I could myself--never but one, and she was a woman and could
do her part better--Sarah, my first wife, and her kind aren't livin'
now.