Ben Cory searched the bay, his eyes ardent for greater distances. Here at the wharf the ships relinquished wakefulness and power, becoming boxes of cargo for the calculations of landsmen: the harbor is not the sea.

"Watch, Ben—he'll take in sail presently." John Kenny was holding his dwarfish body erect to make the most of it, ancient head slanted so that he might look down his nose even at Boston Bay. He thrust his gold-headed cane against a crack in the wharf—his wharf, and smiled at the boy—his boy. "Luck of the Artemis, this breeze. When she nears the wharf Jenks will haul his tops'l to set her aback. You'll see her reach the piling a-tiptoe, a lady, all whisper and dignity. Didn't I say she'd be the lucky thing, when I took thee and Reuben up the Mystic to watch her a-building on the ways?"

"Yes, Uncle John." The mild westerly breeze fluttered Mr. Kenny's gray coat and the gray owl-tufts above his ears. It woke the dance of whitecaps under April sky, and seventeen is a kind of April. "She's a fair ship, sir."

"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is Artemis—well, a loose name, seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John had opened heart and home to them. "Artemis is near three hundred ton, Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."

The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a patch of grass against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave, Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf had been watching Artemis; discouraged by the chill of the breeze, they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the blue-eyed man.

Anchored in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion—stem masts, steep bowsprits, nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope across the palm.

Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about Artemis' rigging. "She owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast—nay, but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye—point or two less, what's a point or two in a long journey? Artemis don't roll too much. I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out. She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking her way slow as a dream."

"Sir, if I—supposing I might ship aboard——"

"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey. Better to drown in poetry than salt water."

"Still, Uncle John, the sea——"

"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old blind murdering bitch-mother."

"No, I think love is not the word, but—nay, I don't know."

"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold vinegar—something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade, we prospered, and I'm a landsman—but I know her. Sometimes if my bad toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They float by me orderly, no crowding—hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one—Amyas Holt maybe, that was first officer of the ship Marigold and would never sing except he was stone cold sober, but I have heard him sing, marry have I. Went down with the Marigold off the Bermudas—all hands.... Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women, children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's coming now?—but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring. Is not the land fair?"

"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.

"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything, dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the Line, a run to Recife in the ship Providence—most of his teeth fallen from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered, Ben, this is the first time you've seen Artemis afloat. When she left the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."

Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing fever—whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.

More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years, Artemis took to the water—tide and wind and season won't wait on the measles—with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo, mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee hardware—anything you like from frying pans to thimbles—she was for Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble; Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and smallpox had played hell with his crew, and he was delayed seeking replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a passel of louse-gnawed Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee butterflies at the first breath of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes. Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and molasses while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey or butterfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his natural voice—the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks' virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.

A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels—Ben heard that above the mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women nor dockside sluts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish, sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to Artemis.

"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the watchman on that Mannahatta tub pissed his britches, no shame to him at all. Watch!"

The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back something hawk-like.

Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks. When he's ashore he never visits around, damn the dear man, not even to Roxbury. There's a reason—never mind. Had he a contrary wind this afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my wallowing old Hera to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks—brought her in like a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With Hera that time—to him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. Hera went down off the Cape—'d I ever tell you?—seven years ago in a fog. Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and one damned little dory? Not a soul lost."

He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he had probably missed something in the earlier telling.

Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the space where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of Artemis would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face, something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing Artemis with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.

The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat. Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd think the homecoming of Artemis from her maiden voyage was a trifle, worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.

Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr. Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"

"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"

"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."

"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was born with those, well I remember."

Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone, hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding sweetness of blue eyes.

John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond the natural limits of Roxbury—he liked that—on a rolling rise of ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a jest.

From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him no rest.

Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that had prompted him to stay home—after all, if he was not going in to watch the return of Artemis, sighted yesterday playing games off the Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this half-holiday from study—driven above all by a need for the April day as it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness, Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.

Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's presence could exist nowhere else.

He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.

At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.

Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle and a secret place—old; the spruce must have been already old in the time of King Philip's War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of green.

Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the seasons—the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near houses.

Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence—a weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock, not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.

Why?...

Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.

Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's grass in that clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.

It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his room—it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home in any forest outside the Eclogues of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too—Reuben had heard his axe in the woodshed.

If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond, parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.

Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.

Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said "God bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes—a memorably ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad, intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.

"I'm sorry, sir—didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't you!"

"It was the wig."

"The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I'm in a manner disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?"

"Metonymy," said Reuben.

"Brrr!" said Amadeus Welland. "Mm-yas, of course, 'tis the spotted child, the younger one. How's your brother, Mr. Cory?" "Well," said Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.

Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. "Ah, the wig! The structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous therapeutic—I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods."

"I can see that, sir."

"You can, ha? I bought it in Newport," said Mr. Welland dreamily. "Ten years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor artifice—let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you'll discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much exposed, sir, much exposed to the winds of mischance, and so must even carry his own dem'd shrubbery about with him, and that's what I do. Honestly, Reuben, a'n't it a hell of a wig?"

"Oh, Mr. Kenny!" said Faith Jenks. "Brier roses? I'll rest content with that till you say a prettier." She studied Ben with silent laughter.

Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben's face had been lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean that he was in love.

Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered—remembered——

In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.

Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died, but not the secret life under the snow. She planted them.... At the first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go back—some day. I must learn whether that is true.

The blue of Faith's coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it—merely such a flaw as a goddess needs if she's to wear the semblance of common clay.

"Your mother's well, my dear?"

"Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so readily distracted!"

"I know. Ah, forgive me!—Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity—how's my lady Charity?" This to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.

She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister's in everything but grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it, clenching its tiny companion. "'D do," she said, and examined her shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.

A third strange face watched Ben—still, brown, impersonal; a Negro girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten, cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the lady Artemis. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the brown girl's long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.

"Indeed," Faith was saying, "I've heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we might meet sooner. We don't go about much, with my father so much away at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?"

"Yes." Why, that was no croak! "I feel it to be long ago."

She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. "'Deed you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in big old long books from a day's end to the next."

Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. "True, Faith, their tutor and I, we make 'em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn—the both of 'em, I'm proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished 'em better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no classics in childhood." Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.

"Your brother isn't in Boston today to see the Artemis?"

"No, Mistress Faith, he—well...."

"Mr. Reuben," said Uncle John too lightly, "was of a mind to go walking in the woods."

"Ah, the pretty thing!" Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for divine tactfulness. "Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never."

"A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father hath told me the thought's good—larger spread of jib, and a stronger angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely thought 'twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!—so peradventure art is good for something?"

"Sir...." The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat was mended with large seaman's stitches, evidence that no woman tended him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr. Kenny's wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. "I fear I intrude—is it I'm addressing the owner of the ketch?"

"I am her owner, sir."

"I've not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too betwixt here and the Indies, that'll be the eastern Indies—Molucca, Ceylon...."

His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England speech—once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out of nowhere to sing for them.

"Ay, she's fair," said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.

"And if it's you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?"

Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his great-uncle what he thought of as the "Artemis look"—love me, love my ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the ardor of his voice—why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.

"I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the Artemis, Peter Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending."

"Artemis! O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir, your humble servant." No man's servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence: that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased. "Artemis!—what other name would be possible?" said Mr. Shawn, and grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same breath: "Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?"

"That she don't," said John Kenny rather blankly. "Armed she is—you can see the la'board falconet from here—but no letters of marque, sir. I've not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when the French do beset us so, but for my ships I'll have no part of it, having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr. Shawn—refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue."

"For which I honor you, sir," said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he changed the subject. "I've heard of your father, Mistress Jenks, the way I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as any captain under sail, now that's no lie."

Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr. Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing Artemis to the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet, though it was well tied. "Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr. Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet—your shoulders are broad enough."

Later in white nights Ben thought: She said that, and to me....

Later also Ben found it hard to recall anything else said by Faith or himself—small talk, surely—in those moments of nearness while Artemis, clear of the harbor shipping, moved down on them tranquilly, a great wind-begotten dream realizing herself in the here-and-now.

A round bulky man held a rope at the bow of Artemis. Below him a face cruelly pure and calm, carved from apple-wood a year ago by an old artist of Dorchester who was nearly blind, stared into a world of many homelands. In the momentary enclosing silence, Ben saw a flash of startled recognition between that stout man in the bow and Daniel Shawn; since both looked away immediately, Ben dismissed it as a vagary of his own imagination, or none of his business. The stout man was unknown to Ben, perhaps one of the replacements signed on at Kingston; a greasy, unrevealing face. Ben heard a flurry of shouts from men aboard and men on the dock who knew each other. He also found a face he knew, and waved—the mate, yellow-haired Jan Dyckman, who had visited at Roxbury, brick-solid and big, a shy and gentle soul ashore, moving with a warm confidence in all the ways of his Lutheran God. But Jan did not see Ben's wave or had no time for it, taut at the starboard rail and watching simultaneously every inch of remaining canvas, every ripple between Artemis and the wharf.

"Ahoy, Mistress Faith!" That was a north-wind voice overriding all other commotion, from the bald giant looming aft near the helmsman. Artemis was yet some thirty yards away, gliding, barely disturbing the filthy dockside water. Ben's glance took in the giant—it could only be Peter Jenks—with a wonder that such an iron mountain could have begotten the loveliness of Faith. Even that far away Captain Jenks was more than life-size, and surely knew it. His nose was flattened like a board, set in deep leather creases between small eyes icy blue in the sunlight—courageous arctic eyes without compassion.

Faith jumped at her father's shout, clutching her skirt prettily. "Clarissa! My kerchief—quickly!" Her hand behind her snapped a finger impatiently before the Negro girl gave her a white kerchief; then Faith was running, waving the cloth, expertly careless of ropes and tackle and the roustabouts who lurched out of her path. She knew her way; she was not impeding them, and stepped back properly when it was time for that rope in the bow to leap ashore.

Another snaked from the pier to be caught amidships. The lady Artemis needed no restraining thrust of the fenders. She nudged wet timbers as one arranging a pillow for her head, and fell asleep.

"I would not," said Reuben, "utter any gratuitous multiloquence which could be construed as a detraction, libel or impudicitous derogation of another man's periwig."

"I yield. You know bigger and sillier words than I do."

"Then will you tell me, sir, what on earth you were looking for over there by the pond?"

"Mm-yas," said Mr. Welland, "the pond. Why, I've been longing for years to learn how peeper frogs peep. Don't have much time to ramble—difficult for a doctor to break away, but now and then I do, with the excuse of hunting for herbs. I heard 'em peeping hereabouts, thought at last I might catch 'em at it. No such thing. They hide when I peep at 'em, and devil a peep will they peep. Why's that?"

"Too near them, sir, and not still enough. You should have sat well away from the water, with no motion for at least a quarter-hour."

Deliberately Mr. Welland took snuff from an enameled box, and sneezed, a light explosion with a double after-echo. "Fi-choo-shoo!... Mr. Cory, I take it they have peeped in your presence?"

"Oh yes. The little throats swell up enormous and they shake all over." To soften the blow Reuben added: "I'm sure they would for you, Mr. Welland. Merely a matter of making yourself look like a rock."

"At my age I'm to imitate a boulder—boulder and yet more bold."

"Paronomasia," said Reuben. "The ultimate in wit."

"Boo! You imitated a rock rather well yourself. I never heard a sound. When I first saw you I thought I had to do with one of the Little People."

"Ah! The invisible world!" Daringly Reuben made horns of his fingers and waggled them. He was very happy, no longer much concerned to wonder why.

"Might I ask further, why you don't find it strange that I should spend my declining years endeavoring to watch frogs peep?"

Reuben considered. "I think everything is interesting."

"Oh!" That was a startled sound, without laughter. Mr. Welland looked away from him so long that Reuben's pleasure clouded over. He could have gone too far; said something wrong; happiness and friendship could tumble, an air-castle in ruins. Mr. Welland was holding out the snuffbox, closed. "Try if you can discover the catch. If you can I'll tell you who gave it me."

Reuben studied it, aware he was being tested in some way that went far beyond the trifling problem. The box was of ebony, the sides covered with intricate carving of grape leaves. The enameled picture inset in the cover displayed a naked goat-leg fellow plucking a cluster from a vine. Since pressure on the carving brought no result, Reuben methodically tried lifting the leaves With a thumbnail until one yielded and the box was open.

"Mph!—most persons spend half an hour and give it up. Well, it was given me—worthless keepsake, he said—by Sir Thomas Sydenham, when as a young man stuffed with mine own importance I called upon him at London. He was most kind. Corrected my quantities, I recall, when I ventured a Latin tag in what he tolerantly called my vile colonial accent. He died, I believe, in the year of the revolution, 1689—so you see, Reuben, time and change, and we grow old somehow." Reuben thought: But he is not speaking to himself in the far-off way of the old; he is speaking to me, and for my sake.... "Perhaps you never heard of Sir Thomas?"

"No, sir, I never did."

"He hath been called the English Hippocrates—an exaggeration, but a great man certainly, I think the greatest in medicine since Harvey."

"Harvey?"

"There are gaps in your learning after all. I'll be happy to tell you about Harvey if you like. About Signor Malpighi too, who as it happens discovered the presence of the capillaries by dissecting the lung of a frog. Not one of your frogs of course. Some Swiss or Italian frog, unknown benefactor of science."

"Did you think, sir, I was all vain because I like to make comical noises with big words?"

"No, sir. On reflection—no; I did not think that."

"I've been called—oh, flippant or the like, because it seems I do now and then laugh at the wrong time."

"Who calls you that?"

"Oh!... My tutor for one, but meaneth no harm by it. Actually he's very kind, and I suppose I try him badly, but then by chance I'll pronounce some Latin quantity correctly or come unscathed through the horrid jungle of some Greek verb, and he forgiveth all."

"M. Cory, I have been sitting here fearing that perhaps I had laughed at the wrong times, and that you might regard me as—mm-yas, flippant or the like."

"I do not."

"In that view of the case, perhaps you and I ought to be friends."

"As a matter of fact," said Reuben, "I thought we already were."

South of Boston Neck the road to Roxbury entered a desolate mile between the waters of Gallows Bay on the east and a waste of salt marsh. Here the smell of the sea was all about you; above, a meager crying of gulls in the windy daytime. Near Roxbury the salt flats and Gallows Bay were partly hidden by woods and rocky knolls. Lights were said to wander this mile of road at night, not fireflies nor lanterns of vessels on Gallows Bay, which had honestly earned its name.

Efforts had been made to pave the road during the last sixty or seventy years. Stones rose up and walked. Hence derived grave democratic discussion and heartburning: if you have all the rocks of New England to draw upon, there's still nothing so pleasing as a paving block to support the sills of a barn, especially if it be cut as God might have left it in a state of nature, so that no town father can lay his hand on his heart and swear it came from the particular hole where his horse broke a leg.

Ben Cory watched a soaring of white wings tipped with black as a gull drifted out of sight over the marshes. Out here the white-headed eagles came at times, lesser life falling quiet. Lordly, Uncle John called them, but said they were cowardly pirates too, and told once how he had watched them circle about till other birds rose with hard-won fish, and then torment them into yielding it. Ben wondered as the gull vanished, why he should think of the man Daniel Shawn. He had missed something Uncle John was saying, and clucked to his mare. "Your pardon, sir?"

"I was saying Mr. Jenks had three daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity. Hope died as an infant. Charity's but a young thing...."

"Faith is—charming, I thought."

"She is," said Uncle John with total dryness. "Ben, I wish your opinion of that fat man, that new bosun Tom Ball."

"My opinion?" Flattered and flustered, Ben drew his wits away from the dream of Faith. "He's short of words certainly, Uncle John. He only showed me about the deck while you was engaged with Mr. Dyckman, and I don't recall he said more than half a dozen words, and that in so thick a talk—Devon, isn't it?—I missed much of it. That's not fat, Uncle John, that's mostly brawn, I believe.... I don't like it, sir, when a man stares at me long without winking. They say it's the candid way, but I feel more as if he was defying me to call him a liar."

"Eh, Benjamin, you're somewhat sharp. I don't like him either, but Mr. Jenks calls him a good sailor. Ay, Devon, where my father was born—within sound of the Channel, he used to say, and could speak of the old country pleasantly when he was not laying about him as the Lord's own interpreter and flail...."

"You said Mr. Jenks never visits about ashore?"

"Mph!... Ben, when you're a man grown, should you find yourself a little too fond of drink, I suggest you resist it, even sometimes at cost of being named a poor thing, canting killjoy or whatever. 'Tis a matter of being your own man. Should you find—by your own judgment, boy—that drinking interferes with that, don't drink. Did you like Mr. Shawn?"

"Yes, sir, I did like him, very much. Are you telling me indirectly, Uncle John, that Captain Jenks——?"

"I am." Mr. Kenny halted his gray gelding on a rise of ground. "I like to pause here, Ben, where you see only the roofs and little threads of smoke.... Yes, he's something a slave to it, though never aboard ship. At sea he allows his men the ration and not a drop for himself. But ashore he must fall into another sea, of liquor—drifting, helpless, I don't know what stops him from sinking altogether. Blameth it on the moon and tides—his fancy. He told me once how in the dark times of the moon at sea he goes near mad with need of it but won't yield—then I dare say it'll go hard with every man aboard. The moon's his friend in some manner—he's well enough when she's waxing full, sad and bitten by his need when she waneth, noticed it a thousand times. I told him who Artemis was in the legends of the Greeks, virgin huntress and goddess of the moon. He was pleased, and turned on my ketch a newly loving eye. A troubled man, Benjamin. Knoweth well what is right, but no one ever tells him, no preacher or any other. Having shaken hands with him at last, I dare say you can imagine why few would undertake it."

"My hand still aches.... Sir, do you think that if I—I mean when I go to Harvard, I shall know what I wish to do, that is for a life's work?" So it was spoken, the doubt that had been nagging his days.

"I trust so, Ben." And was that all? Ben wondered—was that all the old man would say? A gust of wind full of the sea smell blew across Ben's shoulder and sent a last year's oak leaf scurrying down the road. The wind's embrace was cold, the leaf a reminder of autumn in the flood of spring. "You know I concur in the wish your father expressed in his last moments: you and Reuben must acquire learning. But then the decision must be with you. If you should decide to take up my affairs when I'm done with 'em, why, I'll be pleased, more perhaps I shouldn't say. Trade, commerce—it's not dull, Ben, so long as one keeps the wit alive with a private philosophy. Our holy friends make great show of despising it, the while it keeps them and the rest of us fed and clothed. It might not suit Reuben—well well, let time work a little on it, boy.... If you should come to see it that way, remember ships are the thing, and there our dirty Boston's got 'em all by the nose. Never be a port in the Americas to match her, never."

Daringly Ben murmured: "What about Newport?"

"Pretty little harbor. I hear they never let anybody piss off the docks—afraid of flooding it, you know. Now New York might come to something one day, if they ever find the wit to use what nature gave 'em. Like you to see New York some time, maybe after the war, the way the river comes down wide and grand past miles of cliffs on the west. Nothing like it in New England nor Old England neither. Clean, wondrous blue—Jenks told me once 'tis good as well water above the tides. He took a sloop of mine up to Albany once, years ago. Well, poor Jenks! He'll be into the second or third tankard by now, scarce giving that slave wench time to lift off his boots. Yes, the troubled men—seekers and dreamers and friends of the moon, a little mad, and minds grown wise before their time like your sweet brother's—I don't pretend to understand 'em, Ben, the way I think you and I understand each other. I suppose they engender a great share of the sorrow in the world. What a place it might be without 'em! In a world without 'em I swear I'd die of boredom before I was hanged."

"She is fair. When we saw her a-building up the river and climbed about on her naked ribs, that was different, Ru. Now she's alive, even at the wharf you feel it. She's only waiting to meet the winds again."

"You'd marry the sea if you could. Come here to the window and look down. Something else is fair. Still light enough if you look sharp. The apple—nay, I mean the little new one, that Rob set out the first year we came here. It's budded, for the first time."

"So it is. Will Rob let 'em ripen this year, I wonder?"

"I dare say not.... So you've met the great Jenks at last."

"Never shake hands with him. Remember the bosun Joe Day? Died at the Indies—smallpox, Mr. Dyckman said. I was fond of Joe Day—made me think of Jesse Plum, the tales he could tell.... What's Kate contriving that smells so good all over the house?"

"Roast goose, O wanderer."

"And what's up with Hibbs? Ha'n't seen him since I got home."

"Sulking. Benjamin, stand forth! You ask me, what of Gideon Hibbs; you ask, oh, where is he? Hibbs Pontifex hath gone to roost, with a book upon his knee."

"Upstairs?"

"Next door."

"All lank and lean?"

"Ay—dreaming of roast goose."

"What planneth he for the morrow's morn, the evil old—uh—papoose?"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Not Ovid still!"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Oh, no!"

"Multum in parvo, fiat lux, pro bono publico. Balls, we've done better, but for a Monday evening it'll pass. Throw me a clean pair of drawers, will you, like a fair angel, Ben? Was Jenks' daughter there?"

"Yes. Both, I mean. The younger's a child. And a stranger introduced himself, a Mr. Daniel Shawn. Excited by Artemis and won Uncle John's heart praising her. A seaman, silver-tongued—honest, I thought."

"What was he after?"

"I don't know that he was after anything, Ru. From his talk he must have been everywhere and seen everything."

"Maybe not everything."

"Oh, Muttonhead!—a manner of speaking."

"A goaty eye for Jenks' fair daughter belike?"

"No. Merely polite to her, like any gentleman."

"An old man then."

"Forty perhaps."

"Ah, Ben, these ancient cods! They're the worst, didn't you know? Consider our Pontifex, how we sometimes hear him moaning in the night. I tell you, he hath a private succubus. Down the chimney cometh she, most punctually, Wednesdays and Saturdays, to grind him all night long between hot ivory legs, grind him even unto the very last gerunds and aorists and ablatives and first person plural of the verb contorquere."

"Ha?"

"Alas, poor Ben!—no Latin? It means to wriggle."

"Well, shame on you!"

"Button your long lip. You can't say that when I've made you laugh."

"No, blast you, I can't. As for Shawn, I think he only wished to know more about Artemis."

"Ay-yah. Still everyone wants for something."

"Granted, O Grandfather! And thou?"

"Trifles. Most of the ocean and the empire of Cathay. The spring moon. The Northwest Passage, the Fountain of Youth, a few acres of Eden. Trifles, but still you see it's true—everyone wants for something, even I."