into the world with the proper number of fingers and toes; he swims as
soon as he walks, knows how to drive a bargain as soon as he can talk,
goes cook of a coaster at the mature age of eight years, and thinks
himself robbed of his birthright, if he has not made a voyage to the
Banks before his eleventh birthday comes round. There is good stuff in
the Cape boys, as the South-Street ship-owners know, who don't sleep
easier than when they have put a "Cape man" in charge of their best
clipper. Quick of apprehension, fertile in resource, shrewd,
enterprising, brave, prudent, and, above all, lucky,--no better seamen
sail the sea. Long may they keep their prestige and their sand!

They are not rich on the Cape,--in the Wall-Street sense of the word,
that is to say. I doubt if Uncle Lew Baker, who was high line out of
Dennis last year, and who, by the same token, had to work himself right
smartly to achieve that honor,--I doubt if this smart and thoroughly
wide-awake fellow took home more than three hundred dollars to his wife
and children when old Obed settled the voyage. But then the good wife
saves while he earns, and, what with a cow, and a house and garden-spot
of his own, and a healthy lot of boys and girls, who, if too young to
help, are not suffered to hinder, this man is more forehanded and
independent, gives more to the poor about him and to the heathen at the
other end of the world, than many a city man who makes, and spends, his
tens of thousands.

Uncle Abijah Brewster, the father of this Elkanah, was an old
Banker,--which signifies here, not a Wall-Street broker-man, but a
Grand-Bank fisherman. He had brought up a goodly family of boys and
girls by his hook-and-line and, though now a man of some fifty winters,
still made his two yearly fares to the Banks, in his own trim little
pinky, and prided himself on being the smartest and jolliest man