One bitter night, after reading with great enjoyment of the prompt action of the bears in the taking off of those ribald little boys who had made unpleasant remarks about the scarcity of hair among the prophets (surprising how alike the boys of to-day are with the boys of the scriptural epoch), and had prayed till Emily had fallen asleep, with her face squelched in the seat of the chair she knelt by, and had awakened and acknowledged her fault. “For,” as she said to me, “after he had fallen over my legs without waking me, he might have thought I was lying if I had said I was just thinking.” And I had quite agreed with her and complimented her on her truthful nature--and he had taken his tin pail of coffee in his mittened hand and his package of sandwiches in his pocket and gone forth to his night’s watch. He had been a sailor in his early manhood, and, in addition to the tattooed anchor and star on the backs of his hands, he still retained a few words from his sailor’s vocabulary which he used now and then with bewildering effect upon the landsmen. Mrs. Brockwell found that habit particularly trying. She was one of those women who always get drabbled when they walk. Long street dresses were worn in her day, and had she possessed six hands instead of two, she would have failed still to keep her dress out of the wet or the mud. On Sundays when she was crowded into her best gown and was clutching her skirt in the most useless places, trying to pick her way across a muddy street, old Thomas was wont to exclaim from the rear: “Take a reef in the la’board side of your petticoat, Emily!” and Emily would hoist high the right side instead, and the left would go trailing through the mud, while the old man pounded the walk with his Sunday cane, crying: “La’board--la’board--la’board, not sta’board. Now just look at your sails! Oh, woman, the ignorance of you at forty-six, not to know your la’board from your sta’board side!” And meek Emily never suggested that left and right were the generally accepted terms for use on shore.