A GLAD SURPRISE.

IN the course of three hours, it was evident that both of the rescued persons were reviving fast. Though unable to speak, they swallowed eagerly all that Captain Rhines thought proper to give; the expression returned to their eyes and features, and their limbs twitched with convulsive starts.

“Charlie,” said the captain, “I’ll take these people home in the schooner.”

“Leave them here, we can take care of them; and leave the schooner too. I’ll make a new mast and windlass for her.”

“It is too much for Mary, with a young child,—two invalids to take care of.”

“No, it ain’t, father; they will be all right, as soon as it will do to let them eat and drink.”

“I’ll take the young man, at any rate, and you may have the boy.”

They wrapped him in a blanket, and he was so emaciated that Charlie took him in his arms as though he had been an infant, and put him into the whale boat.

“Wife,” said the captain, the next morning, as he sat watching his charge, as he lay sleeping, after having eaten more than he had allowed him at one time before, “do you know that since this young man has come to himself a bit he looks very natural to me. I’ve seen him, or some of his folks, before.”

“It wouldn’t be at all strange if you had, for you have been a traveller all your life.”

“It beats all how familiar his features look; and the more I look at him, the more the likeness grows upon me. He’s the very image of somebody I’ve known and loved right well, but to save me, I can’t tell who. He’ll be strong enough to talk when he wakes, and I’ll know who he is, and all about it. Only see, Mary, how the color has come into his lips! they are not drawn apart as they were. See how his eyeballs are filled out, and his fingers; and his nose is not so sharp as it was. He’s doing first rate.”

As the captain had predicted, the young man, who had been within a hair’s breadth of eternity, awoke a few minutes before noon, extremely weak, but free from stupor, and in partial possession of his faculties, and inquired where he was.

“You are among friends, young man, and safe; make yourself easy. Where are you from?”

“Salem.”

“Salem! Was you born and brought up in Salem?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is your name?”

“Brown, sir.”

“What is your father’s business?”

“He was a shipmaster, but he is not living.”

“Was his name Arthur?” cried the captain, more eagerly, his face flushing, and then becoming very pale.

“Yes, sir.”

“And was he cast away in the Roanoke on Abaco, and all hands lost?”

“Just so, sir.”

“God bless you, my son,” shouted the captain, leaping from his chair, and grasping both hands of the seaman, while tears of gladness, streaming from his eyes, fell thick and fast on the pale features of his wondering guest; “your father was one of God Almighty’s noblemen; the first and best friend I ever had. All I am and all I’ve got in the world I owe to him. Didn’t you never hear him tell about Ben Rhines, the long-legged boy just out of the woods, with pine pitch sticking to him, that had to make his mark on the ship’s articles, that he learned to read and write, and made a shipmaster of?”

“O, yes, sir, a great many times.”

“Well, I’m Ben Rhines, what there is left of him. Is your mother living? and what family did your father leave?”

“My mother is living in Salem. Father left three children, two girls and myself; he also took a nephew to bring up after his father died.”

“Did he leave property?”

“No, sir. He owned a large part of the Roanoke, and there was no insurance on her. My mother was left poor; father wasn’t a man to lay up money.”

“No, he had too large a heart. I’m glad of it. I’ve got enough for both, thank God! I thought I’d got enough to take me well through, and shouldn’t try to make any more,—but I will. I’ll just give my mind to making money. I’ll make lots of it. I’ll go to sea again. I’ve got a glorious use for money now. But how came you in an English ship? Among all the friends your father had, and the hundreds whom, to my certain knowledge, he helped into business, was there not one who thought enough of his obligations to do for his son?”

“Yes, sir. After father was lost, mother kept a boarding-house for masters and mates of vessels, and many of his former friends boarded with her, and set up our girls in a dry goods store. My cousin went into a grocery store. I was the youngest. When I left school I went on board a ship, belonging to a friend of father’s, as a cabin boy. He put me right along. I am only twenty-one last July, the fourteenth. The ship was sold in Liverpool; and by the captain’s good word, I got a mate’s berth in an English ship, knowing if I got across to Halifax, I could easily get home from there. The ship sprung a leak: the crew and second mate took the boats, nautical instruments, and nearly all the provisions, and left. They didn’t like the captain; he was a hard man, and there had been quarrelling all the voyage. Finally they put on their jackets (they might have kept the ship free), and told him they had as many friends in hell as he had, and left. They offered to take me with them; but I thought it my duty to stick by the captain and the ship.”

“But how came the cook, the seaman, and the boy to stick by you. Why didn’t they join the strongest party?”

“The black was a slave in Jamaica. The captain took a liking to him, bought him when he was nineteen, and gave him his liberty. He wouldn’t leave the captain. The sailor was a townie and shipmate of mine in the other ship; the boy belongs in Salem, the son of one of our neighbors, and was also with me in the other ship, and a better boy never stepped on a vessel’s deck. We three stuck together. Captain Rhines, is there any way I can get a letter to my mother, to inform her of my safety, and also of the boy’s? She knows I was on my passage in the Madras to Halifax, and that it is time for the ship to arrive there, and if the crew are picked up or get ashore they will report us as lost.”

“We have a mail now once a week. It will go day after to-morrow.”

At this period of the conversation Mrs. Rhines came into the room, when the captain, rushing at her, half smothered her with kisses.

“Why, what is the matter, Benjamin?” she exclaimed, noticing his flushed face, and the traces of tears on it.

“Matter, Molly!” bursting out afresh; “the matter is, we’ve got another boy. You know, wife, how much you have heard me tell about Mr. Brown, the mate of the first square-rigged vessel I went to sea in, that did everything, and more too, for me?”

“Indeed, Benjamin, I guess I have.”

“This is his boy, lying here on this lounge!—his only son, named for him.”

“How glad I am, Benjamin!—glad on your account, and on my own, for the sake of his mother.”

“Don’t you think, wife, when I took his father by the hand, to bid him good by, as I was about to step aboard the James Welch as first officer (through and only through his means), I said, with a full heart, ‘Mr. Brown, how can I ever repay you?’ His reply was, ‘Ben, do by other young men you may fall in with, and who are starting in the world with nobody to help them, as I have by you.’ And now a kind Providence has put it in my power to save the life of his son, so help me God, if ever a debt was paid, principal, interest, and compound interest, this shall be. Kiss him, wife.”

Mrs. Rhines kissed the wasted cheek of the young man, and assured him that she was, equally with her husband, interested in his welfare, and rejoiced to receive him as a member of their household.

“Now, Arthur,” said the captain, “you are our boy. You are just as much at home in this house as we are ourselves, and the more we can do for you the better we shall like it. John, here is your brother.”

This whole-souled declaration elicited no reply. The young man, exhausted by the long and exciting conversation, had fallen asleep.

“Poor boy! he is weak. Only see the great sores on him. See what a sight of little boils are coming out all over his arms.”

“That, wife, is soaking in salt water so long; and the sores are where the ropes he was lashed with chafed him.”

Utterly unable to keep the discovery confined to himself and family any longer, he mounted his horse, and rode full speed to tell Uncle Isaac and Charlie. When he reached Charlie’s, he found the boy (who was less accustomed to exposure) had recovered strength much more slowly than the mate. The moment he saw the captain, he wanted to know how Mr. Brown was getting along.

“You like Mr. Brown?” said the captain, after replying to his question.

“Like him, sir! You can’t help liking him. Every man on board liked him. The men wanted him to go with them in the boats; but they wouldn’t have the captain, and he thought it was his duty to stick by him.”

“Do you think you will want to go to sea any more?”

“I shall go if Mr. Brown goes. How can I get home, sir, when I get my strength again?”

“It will be some time before you will be fit to go. When that time comes, I’ll get you home.”

“Could I send a letter, when I am able to write?”

“Mr. Brown’s going to write to-morrow to his folks and yours. What is your name, my boy?”

“Edward Gates, sir. They call me Ned on board ship.”

“You are from Salem, too?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Brown and I live on the same street—King Street. His house is only four doors from mine.”

“Then you’ve always known him?”

“O, yes, sir. I went to school with him. He was one of the big boys, and I was a little one. I used to say my lessons to him when the master was busy, and sometimes he kept school when the master was sick. Sometimes, when his father’s ship was in port, he would get her yawl boat, and give us little fellows a sail.”

After the building of the Casco, Charlie had been enabled to gratify his taste for cultivating the soil and improving his place. The Hard-scrabble, under the command of Seth Warren, and the Casco, under that of Isaac Murch, had made profitable voyages. Charlie and John found themselves in possession both of means and leisure. Charlie had built a large house, roomy enough to contain his men whenever he wanted to build more vessels, a barn, workshop, and other out-buildings. Hard wood stumps soon decay, white pine will last fifty years, and oak much longer than beech, maple or birch. The slope in front of the house presented a most enchanting view. Directly in front of the house was a most noble growth of forest trees, where the birch, beech, maple, and oak, in associate beauty, intermingled their huge trunks, covered with moss, and of such majestic height as to permit the buildings to be seen between their stems. A footpath wound among them to the outer edge, where, between their gnarled and twisted roots, gleamed the clear waters of Silver Spring.

Almost any summer or autumn morning, about nine o’clock, you might see a gray squirrel sitting on one of the great tree roots, viewing himself in the transparent water, washing his face, and making his toilet by its aid. Scattered all along on the surface of the slope margining the beach were clumps and single trees, of peculiar beauty and vast size, which Charlie, by abstaining from the use of fire, had spared; thus preserving what it would have required seventy years, and a large outlay, to have obtained by planting.

Neither the mill nor the shop could be seen, except in one direction; that is, when you were directly in front, they were so embosomed in foliage, Charlie having left the growth around them, for he was in possession of ideas of taste and beauty, of which neither Captain Rhines, Uncle Isaac, or John had the least conception. It was a pleasant sight, as you sailed away in the summer, to obtain indistinct glimpses of the water between the tree trunks as it poured off the dam, listen to the click of the saw, and catch through the leaves the gleams of the carpenters’ axes; while far beyond, as the land gradually rose, large fields of corn and grain, with their vivid green, presented a most singular and beautiful contrast to the black limbs and barkless trunks of the girdled trees among which they lay, their hollow trunks—some standing upright, others fallen—affording a most excellent roost for the crows, who paid their respects to Charlie’s corn when it was in the blade.

At the lower edge of an immense forest of maple and birch, from which every vestige of underbrush had been removed, were seen the walls of a sap camp; while, instead of a path leading to the house, marked by spotted trees, a carriage road had been made, so that Captain Rhines could ride back and forth in his wagon, and Parson Goodhue in his chaise—for he had arrived to that dignity. It was not, however, much like the vehicle bearing that appellation at the present time. The wheels and arms were large enough for a modern team wagon; the frame of the top was made of iron; instead of leather, it was covered with painted canvas, and on the sides were projections, like the wings of a bird, to throw off the mud.

Charlie and Joe cut a footpath through the forest, between their farms, and put logs across the gullies and sloughs, so that they could go back and forth conveniently.

Two other notable events occurred this year. You know Uncle Isaac was not a whit like most elderly people, any more than chalk is like cheese. There was nothing stereotyped about him. He made a cider mill, to replace his white oak beam and wooden maul. When he went to Thomaston to see General Knox’s mills, he saw a cider press, in which the cheese was pressed with wooden screws. The apples, also, instead of being pounded to pieces in a trough, with a wooden maul, were ground between nuts, made with grooves and projections fitting into each other, and turned by a horse. Uncle Isaac took the pitch of the thread of the screws, and when he came home made press and mill.

Ben also, that fall, brought over to his father and Charlie a bushel of apples apiece, which he had raised from his young orchard.

“What do you think now about making cider on Elm Island?”

Charlie said, “I think, when you get ready, there will be a mill for you;” and told him what Uncle Isaac had done.

Uncle Isaac didn’t stop here. He made his wife and Sally Rhines a cheese-press, with screws. The way they pressed cheese before this was, to put a lever under the sill of the house, place the cheese under it, and then put rocks on the other end of the lever. At Ben’s suggestion, he also made a press to press hay. Before this, they carried it loose on board vessels, and couldn’t take any great amount, although, in Massachusetts, presses had come in use, and Ben had seen them.