The Henrietta C. March was a brig of five hundred tons burden, and was bound for Santa Cruz in the West Indies; and Captain March had stopped off his home port to take aboard his wife and daughter and Drew, who had been given a long vacation by his church. The mate of the brig had been taken suddenly ill, and for two days the captain had been trying to get a man to fill his place.

It was with an impression of almost Crusoe-like loneliness that Drew found himself upon the deck when they reached the brig at last, and the mate, with the crew at his heels, had gone forward to swing the boat to her place on the center-house, and then to the windlass to heave the chain short. Drew set his baggage down on the deck and, walking forward, watched the men heaving at the windlass, the jar and clank of which filled the vessel. On the quarter-deck the captain, in his shirt-sleeves and wearing a shapeless brown hat, walked back and forth, occasionally glancing aloft at the fly, which was beginning to straighten out in the freshening southwest breeze. His wife and daughter were nowhere in sight.

The clank of the windlass grew slower and slower as the cable shortened, and every moment or two Medbury glanced over the bow. Finally he raised his hand above his head, and the men came trooping down from the forecastle-deck, some going aloft to loosen sails and others going to various stations with a businesslike directness that seemed to Drew to be under the guidance of wordless intuition. He stood leaning against the fore-rigging as two came toward him with the unseeing look of men who, having a duty to perform, recognize no obstacle, and, gently pushing him aside, began to throw to the deck the coils of running rigging against which he had been leaning. He moved from place to place, always finding himself in the way and being pushed aside with the silent directness that seemed purely impersonal, until at last, throwing off his coat, he began to pull with the rest. In silence they made place for him. For a time he found his hands catching awkwardly at halyards and braces and slipping over and under other harder hands; then at last he caught the swing, and his body rose and sank with the bodies of the others, and his breathing came heavily and thickened with theirs. The minister had found himself.

It was not until the brig slowly paid off, heeling before the fresh breeze, and the outward-bound song began its chant about her forefoot, that he gathered up his baggage and went aft. Captain March was at the wheel.

"Go right down and make yourself to home," he said. "They'll show you your room. I declare, you take a hold like an old hand. We'll be sending you aloft in a few days."

Drew smiled, but shook his head.

"No," he said; "I shall stick to the deck."

As he went down the companionway and stepped across the cabin, he saw the round little form of Mrs. March kneeling before a locker in what was to be his room. She turned her head at the sound of his footsteps.

"I thought I'd tidy your room up a bit," she told him. "Gracious knows, it needs it. You'd think it started out as a carpenter shop or sail-loft, but got discouraged and ended up just plain litter. I guess Cap'n March has left house-cleaning out of his almanac. And he said this room was clean!""Oh, I am sure it will do nicely, Mrs. March," Drew replied. "My mother says I'm fond of a comfortable disorder."

"I guess men are all alike in that," she said: "they like a clutter—they think it's having things handy. But I hope you'll excuse my back," she went on. "I was just telling my daughter that I was almost ashamed to show my face to you. There I was scolding about Cap'n March being so late, when all the time you and he were so anxious to get off and he scurrying around to find a mate. I declare, sometimes it seems as if the good Lord didn't do his best by women when he gave them tongues. They're like drums to little children—make a dreadful noise and keep them from better things."

Drew smiled. It seemed clear that the captain had used some latitude in explaining his late return home. Meanwhile Mrs. March was backing out of the room."There," she said; "it's in a sort of order, if you don't look too close."

Ten minutes later Drew came out into the cabin, having put away his belongings.

"I am sure the room couldn't be better, Mrs. March," he said. "It seems to me delightfully cozy and neat."

Mrs. March shook her head and smiled as she said:

"I'd 'a' been better satisfied if you hadn't mentioned its being so nice. I've noticed this about men folks, that when things suit them, they don't notice them. When Cap'n March talks and acts like a man right out of the Bible, I'm sure he's been up to mischief, or else has something unpleasant on his mind, one."

Drew laughed as he replied:

"Then I'm going to cultivate wise silences, Mrs. March. I'll give you the impression of a man walking in a dream. I have come on this voyage to learn things; you are not letting me lose any time."

"Oh, if you came to learn things, you'll be wasting time by talking with the rest of us: you must go to my daughter here. She's been called to that, you know—to teach all men and nations." Her voice held a curious note: pride, resentment, anxiety, all seemed to marshal themselves in the words.

"Mother!"

Drew turned quickly at the one word, to see the daughter standing in the doorway of her room. He noticed that while the girl's brow was drawn in a frown, her lips had the undecided irregularity of curve that hinted at a smile suppressed. This study of particulars did not make him any the less alert to a general impression of striking beauty. He smiled and bowed somewhat elaborately, to which the girl returned a curt little nod, though her answering smile was friendly.He had the tact to seem not to recognize the tension and to turn to other subjects, and he now said, with a heartiness that seemed to have long been waiting for expression, that they really were off at last. His glance at the hanging lamp over the table, gently swaying in its gimbals, had the effect of bringing the corroborative testimony of its motion to their notice, while he went on to add that it seemed too good to be true. He said that ever since the brig had anchored off the harbor he had been haunted by the fear that something would happen at the last moment to keep him at home. Not till now had he felt safe.

"It's the other way about with me," said Mrs. March. "I shall not feel safe till I get home again. If the Lord meant for us to go wandering about on the face of the waters, he would have made them steady enough to build roads on. If he put people 'way on the other side of the earth, he meant them to stay there—and us, too," she added lamely, but with sufficient clearness.

Drew halted half-way up the companionway.

"You don't mean to say that you are afraid of the sea, Mrs. March," he asked, "after all your voyages?"

"I've been going with Cap'n March off and on for twenty-five—yes, thirty—years," she answered; "yet I never go out of sight of land without feeling that I'm making faces at my Maker and daring him to punish me."

"Oh, mother's fear is her most precious possession," said the girl, now for the first time coming forth into the cabin. "Nothing has ever happened to her at sea; and that, she feels, is the best reason for thinking that something is bound to happen the next time." She put her hand on the elder woman's shoulder and smiled down on her from her greater height."Well, that's reasonable," retorted Mrs. March. "I was never one to shut my eyes and claim it wasn't thundering. I've got my hearing. What does the good Lord give us feelings for if he doesn't mean us to use them?" With this challenge to unbelief in design in nature, she went to her room.

Captain March was still at the wheel when Drew returned to the deck. Medbury was forward with the crew, busily stowing the anchor. Little by little, Blackwater was disappearing behind the high white cliffs. Drew took up the glass which lay in its box against the frame of the sliding hood of the companionway and looked toward the village. Even as he looked, the white spire of his church disappeared from view. He saw it vanish, and put the glass down, to see the girl standing in the companionway watching the changing shore.

"I've seen the last of my church for three months," he said to her; "now I am really loose and free."

"It's good to get away from responsibility for a while," she said. "I feel now as if I could dismiss all thought and worry until I return. Then things may look different to me. I am going to think so, anyway."

"Hetty," said the captain, "just run down and get my pipe off my desk, won't you? You're younger than I am. Besides, I'm busy." He turned to Drew. "Ashore I smoke cigars mostly; my wife says a pipe's low. But here I'm master." He looked about his little kingdom with a mild, complacent face.

His daughter brought his pipe, and, with the gentle look not yet gone from his face, he was filling it when a boyish-looking lad came aft along the starboard side of the house, sent by the mate to take the wheel. Drew, watching the captain, saw his face change. As the lad came to the quarter-deck, the captain pointed a stubby finger at him. "You—" he began harshly, and then hesitated and glanced at his daughter. The boy stopped and turned a frightened look upon the captain.

"Ever been to sea before?" demanded the captain.

"Yes, sir," faltered the boy.

"When?"

"Along the sound here—last summer," he answered.

"Ah," said the captain; then he added: "Didn't you learn the le'ward side of a vessel?"

The boy gave a startled look aloft, and then, with a flaming face, turned quickly and came back along the lee side of the house. The captain gave him the course, and without another word walked over to the rail, where his daughter stood with Drew.

"Sometimes they forget, sometimes they're green and don't know, and sometimes it's just impudence," he said in a voice that the boy could hear. "No matter which it is, ninety-nine times in a hundred the sailorman who does it tumbles right into trouble. This happened to be the hundredth time."

His daughter took him by the shoulders and shook him gently.

"Do you mean to say," she asked in a low voice, "that you might have punished that boy for coming aft on the wrong side? You could see he had forgotten or didn't know. Would you?"

He smiled upon her.

"Well," he answered, "he'd have remembered the next time if I had."

She drew back haughtily.

"I am going to parade—parade up and down that gangway by the hour!" she told him.

Her father chuckled.

"Nothing to hinder," he declared."You're not down on the articles as a forecastle-hand, are you?"

She did not stay to listen, but went indignantly away; at the cabin door, however, she turned and came back.

"You wouldn't have done it," she told him; "I know you wouldn't." She stooped—she was taller than he—and kissed him lightly. Then she went below.

Her father gazed after her.

"Sometimes she's a thousand feet tall," he said to Drew; "and then again—"

"No taller than your heart," suggested Drew as he hesitated.

"That's about it, I guess," said the captain.

The wind freshened as night came on, and had a touch of winter in its sting. They were now running fast by the coast, the high cliffs of which rose dark and desolate on the starboard. The water was black, save where it ran hissing along the sides in a ragged gray ribbon of foam. Behind them, in the west, a crimson flush lingered in the sky. Drew stood at the break in the poop-deck, watching the shadowy forms of the crew moving about the deck forward as they made the royal snug for the night; far overhead he could hear the pennant halyards slatting against the topmast in the dark. Every taut line and halyard sang in the breeze, and there was a dull, humming roar in the canvas; under the lower sails, across the deck, the wind swept crackling and keen.

He heard the mate's last "That's well; belay!" and watched him come aft. He passed without speaking, then hesitated and came back.

"After we get through the Race," he said, "we'll begin to get the swell." He spoke absent-mindedly, as if he were thinking of something quite different; then he walked to the rail and sat down. Drew followed him.Leaning his elbows on his knees, Medbury sat for a long time without speaking; at last he looked up with a little laugh.

"I'd give something to be out of this," he said. "I was a fool to come. I might have known better. It's funny, but a man may know a woman all his life, and at the end of the time know as little about her as if he'd never seen her—that is, really know her—how she'll take things. Now, I suppose this was the very worst thing I could have done. All that I've got to do is to wait till she gets ready and she'll tell me so. Oh, I can see just how she'll look and what she'll say! I don't need to have her tell me. 'You might have thought of my feelings!'"—he changed his voice,—"that's what she'll say. And I—" he broke off impatiently.

Drew looked at him in bewilderment.

"I don't think I understand," he said.

"You don't? Why, mother said she told you all about it one time when you were at the house; she said she had to tell some one. That's how I felt to-night, and I thought you knew."

A light broke in upon Drew.

"Ah!" he said. Then he went on: "Yes, she told me; but she did not tell me the young lady's name. It is Miss March?"

"Yes," Medbury answered. "I thought you must know. You'd have been the only one in Blackwater if you hadn't. Sometimes I feel like the town clock, with every one watching my face. That's one reason why I like the China seas; I can't get farther away."

"Your mother told me very little," said Drew; "she was worrying about your not coming home, and lonely, and it did her good to speak. It did not seem to me a hopeless situation as she told it. Captain March strikes me as being a reasonable man."

"I guess she didn't tell you all, then. Well, I was thinking of what she said and how much she thought of you, and, thinking you knew, I made up my mind to ask your advice. I felt that I had to talk to some one." He hesitated a moment and then, with a boyish laugh, went on: "You see, Hetty and I had always been pretty good friends from the time we went to school together. Well, I've never got over it. When I first went to sea she used to write to me; but after a while she went out to Oberlin to live with an aunt while she went to college; and as I was half the time on the other side of the world, we kind of lost track of each other. I guess she lost track of me more than I did of her, for she's changed since I saw her last, three years ago, and I can't quite make her out. She's friendly enough, but she's different, and has come home with a wild notion of going out to China as a missionary. Good Lord! a girl like that to be thrown away on those—" He could think of no word strong enough to convey his contempt. "Well," he went on, "I can't see any place for me in that plan, but that doesn't seem to trouble her. That's what worries me. Of course the old man's set against her going; but he's set against me, too, because I'm a sailor. That's the way things stand. When I heard she was going out with her father this trip, and the mate was sick, I rushed off to the old man and offered to go with him. He wouldn't hear of it, and engaged two others; but I saw them privately, and they backed out. The old man can't understand why they did. To-day he came to me, and here I am. I've been offered a good vessel, and I intended to stay home a spell; but when I heard Hetty was going, it seemed to me it was my last chance—to go with her; but I guess it was a mistake. I can see she thinks I've done a foolish thing, and is angry."

"I think I can understand how she feels—how most women would feel," said Drew, slowly, after a long pause. "Her sense of justice is outraged—perhaps that's too strong a word; but she feels that you have taken an unfair advantage of her in leaving her no way of escape. She might not have cared to escape, but she likes to feel that retreat is open to her. A woman fights at a disadvantage in these things; she is more sensitive to public opinion than are men, and she has the instinct of a hunted creature. I don't know that I can make it clear," he concluded hopelessly. "Then, too, I may be wholly wrong."

"Well, I don't know what I am going to do, now I'm here," said Medbury, forlornly.

"I should say, attend strictly to business and see her as little as possible for a while," Drew told him. "As for her anger, that may be a good sign. If she were simply indifferent to you, she wouldn't care. She could leave it safely to time to make your coming ridiculous."

When Drew entered the cabin, an hour later, Hetty sat at the table reading, shading her eyes with her hand; her mother sat knitting near her; and on the lounge her father reclined, pipe in mouth, his hat on the floor beside him. Blinking in the strong light, Drew sat down without removing his overcoat.

"Ain't you going to stay a while?" asked the captain. "You can't make church calls to-night."

Drew laughed.

"No," he said; "that's true. I'm out of that. But I'm going back on deck soon. I can't get enough of it: the world seems all sky and stars. I had lost sight of the fact that the earth is so trivial."

Captain March let his feet come slowly to the floor and picked up his hat.

"That's a good deal so," he said. "Still, there's enough earth lying loose around the Race to keep me from forgetting it, at least till we've dropped it astern. I guess I'll go take a look up on deck."

As her father disappeared, Hetty laid down her book and looked up.

"Where are we now?" she asked Drew.

"Little Gull Island light is just ahead of us," he answered.

"That will be our last sight of land, won't it?" she asked. "I'm going up to say good-by."

When she had gone, her mother dropped her knitting in her lap.

"I guess ministers are used to people coming to them with all their troubles," she began, with a plaintive little note creeping into her usually cheery voice, "and I do hope you won't think I'm trying to spoil your vacation by troubling you with ours; but Cap'n March and I have talked and talked till we ain't on speaking terms with our own judgments any more, and what to do next I don't know." Then she, too, told the story.

At the end of her hurried recital she said:

"What she thinks of Tom I don't know; she's awfully close-mouthed about some things. I like Tom, and if I had my way I guess I'd let the young folks settle it themselves. But Cap'n March he's different. He's going to take it for granted that she won't think of Tom because her father disapproves of her marrying a sailor; and he will be so sure of it, and so exasperating, that I don't know what he'll make her do first—marry Tom or go right off to China. In the end he'll let her do just what she makes up her mind to do. He always did, and he always will. If it's one thing, I don't care; but to think of her going off alone to the other side of the world—" She picked up her work and began to knit rapidly, with fast-falling tears.Drew sat with his elbow on the back of the chair, his chin in the palm of his hand, looking down at the floor.

"I wish I knew what to say—to advise, Mrs. March," he now said; "but I do not. Perhaps after a while—"

"Yes," she broke in eagerly; "that's all we could expect. I told Cap'n March I was going to speak to you, and he seemed real pleased. I'm sure you'll think of some way out," she added, with the cheerful optimism with which we shift the burden of our desperate affairs to the shoulders of others. It is hard to believe that Fate will continue unkind when our friends are moved. "And I hope," she went on, "that you won't feel it a duty to encourage Hetty's missionary notions. Of course you're a minister and believe in missionaries, and I shouldn't ask you to go against your conscience; but I suppose you can believe in them without thinking that everybody's fit for the work. I'm sure Hetty isn't. All the missionary women I ever saw were thin and homely, and their clothes seemed just thrown at them. Hetty isn't a bit like that. I can say so, if she is my daughter. And I've scarcely seen her for three years; and if now she should go away to live at the end of the world among heathen idols, with not a homelike thing, and no one to mother her when she needs mothering, then I think that religion is very kind to the heathen, who don't want it, and very cruel to a mother who has always been a God-fearing woman and only wants her child near her when she comes to die. She's all I've got."

She had been speaking with increasing rapidity, but now a light footfall sounded on deck, going aft, and she stopped.

"Go up on deck," she said to Drew. "I don't want her to know I've ever mentioned this to you. She's a dear girl, but sometimes I feel like a hen who is the mother of a duckling. What she's going to do next I don't know."

Drew met the girl by the corner of the house.

"I've been showing father the stars," she said. "He, a sailor, and not to know them! I told him I thought it shameful."

"I suppose he knew the north star," he said, smiling.

"Oh, yes; he knew that. The others didn't seem to impress him. He said they were too shifty to be of much use."

"I think there are some folks who know so much that it kind o' clogs their brains and keeps them from working right," said Captain March, coming up behind her. "I have an idea that we can use just about so much, and all over and above that is just pure waste. I once had a mate that was like that. He could name all the stars, too, and knew a good many things of that sort that didn't help him much to find his longitude; but as for the look of the sky, or the heave of the sea, or the feel of the wind, that meant nothing more to him than so much blank paper. Now, when I walk the deck at night and look up and see the stars shining overhead, winter or summer, they're company for me. That's enough for me; what men call 'em I don't care. I suppose the good Lord's got his own names for them."

Hetty stayed on deck till Little Gull Island light came abreast; but when she had gone below the captain sought out Drew as he stood by the main-rigging and told him his daughter's desire. He made no mention of Medbury.

"Her mother thought you might help us," he concluded; "and I hope you can, for we're in sore trouble. Still, I don't ask you to advise against your conscience. Now I say, 'No,' to her; but if she feels she's got to go, and doesn't change, why, I shall say, 'Yes,' in the end. I know that. My father always wanted me to stay ashore, but I was wild to go to sea. It seemed that I had to go, and in the end I did. I don't know that I got all I expected, but I got what I wanted; and if my girl sets her heart on this as the only way for her to lead her life, why, I sha'n't put a stone in her way when once I'm sure. It wouldn't be right."

---