Captain Whidden rose, too. "Come down in the morning," he said. "You can
sign with us at the Websters' counting-house.--And good-bye, Ben," he
added, extending his hand.

"Good-bye? You don't mean--that I'm not to go with you?"

He smiled. "It'll be a long time, Ben, before you and I meet again on quite
such terms as these."

Then I saw what he meant, and shook his hand and walked away without
looking back. Nor did I ever learn what he and my father talked about after
I left them there together.



CHAPTER II

BILL HAYDEN


More than two-score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I,
Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship
Island Princess, and in them I have achieved, I think I can say with due
modesty, a position of some importance in my own world. But although
innumerable activities have crowded to the full each intervening year,
neither the aspirations of youth nor the successes of maturity nor the
dignities of later life have effaced from my memory the picture of myself,
a boy on the deck of the Island Princess in April, 1809.

I thought myself very grand as the wind whipped my pantaloons against my