"I can't go into details I never knew, so all I can say is that my mother was French Canadian. They had a big farm away up the Petitcodiac River and the girls used to come down to St. John to finish an education that began in Moncton and really ended, in my mother's case, in London, England. "They built ships in those days in St. John, and some of the best were my father's work. As I said, I don't remember him very well, but you will understand how I felt when one day, about nine years ago, we put into a little Spanish port for coal, and they made us fast to an old wooden hulk in the harbour. As we came round her stern I was leaning over the side and I saw the brass letters still on her square counter, _Eastern Star, St. John, New Brunswick_. That was one of my father's finest models. Pitch pine he made her of, and she's beautiful yet, for all her disgrace. I climbed aboard of her while the Corcubion women were trotting to and fro with the coal baskets, and looked round the poop. There was the cuddy as good as ever, teak frames, maple panels, pine flooring. That old hulk brought my old father before me as no daguerreotype could do. There was his name cut on the beam, _John Carville_. It may seem absurd to you people, but do you know, I realized then, as I looked up and saw my father's name on that beam, nearly smothered with countless coats of varnish, I realized how a young man of family feels, a Cecil, say, a Talbot or a Churchill, when he sees his ancestors' names in the history books. My father had done something, he was something. I don't know anyone who can better that title: a builder of ships. "And my father did more than that, he sailed them and owned them. So far he had been under the Union flag, but this time, when he married my mother, and his finest masterpiece, the _Erin's Isle_, was anchored in St. John Harbour ready for sea, the Red Ensign was flying at the gaff." "Did your mother go too?" asked Bill. "Surely! you think that strange? Well, it was that or a life away at the back of everything; life on a farm, with a visit once a year to St. John. You like the country, don't you? Yes, but if you'd been down in the back-woods, if you'd lived in the thrifty way French Canadians have picked up from the Nova Scotians, and _improved_, if you were young and wanted to see something, you'd risk your soul to get away from it. You think a woman would have an awful life at sea. My mother jumped at it. She married a man who was sailing as skipper before she was born, and jumped at it! Taking everything into consideration, I don't blame her. You see, she had ambition, my mother had. Her education had been good enough, and she wanted to find a sphere where she could use it." "And so she went to sea?" said Bill in gentle sarcasm. Bill's aversion to the sea amounts almost to malevolence. She is a bad sailor.