the mast under you for all you'd have the ensign on the booby hatch with
prayers read Sunday morning. I don't wonder you got into weather; I'd
have no word for a Creator who didn't blow in your eye."

"I'll listen to no blasphemy, Captain Ammidon," Barzil Dunsack
said sternly.

"And I'll speak my mind, Captain Dunsack; it's this--your girls are a
long sight too good for you or for any other judgmatical, psalm-singing
devil dodger." He stood fuming at the door. "Good afternoon to you."

Barzil Dunsack reclined with his gaunt bearded head sunk forward on his
thin chest swathed in the gay worsted wrap, his wasted hands, the tendons
corded with pale violet veins, clenched outside the checkered quilt
beneath which his body made scarcely a mark.

Outside, in the soft glow of beginning dusk, Jeremy blamed himself
bitterly for his anger at the sick man. He had gone to see him in a
spirit friendly with old memories, forgetful of their long quarrel in the
stirred emotions of the past days of youth and first manhood; and he had
shouted at Barzil as if he were a lubber at the masthead.

He realized that in order to be in time for supper he must turn toward
the Common and home; but his gaze caught the spars of the strange
barque; and, mechanically, he made his way over a narrow grassy passage
to the wharf. She was the _Cora Sellers_ of Marblehead, and he recognized
from a glance at the cargo that she had been out to the East Coast of
Africa--Mozambique and Zanzibar, Aden and Muscat. A matted frail of dates
swung ponderously in air, there were baled goatskins and sacks of Mocha
coffee, sagging baskets of reddish unwashed gum copal carried in bulk,