When I think of the thing we call death in a general way, spelling it maybe with a capital, it never seems to me a going down at sea--and I have seen that--or any violent accident; but it seems like a white-curtained room with a little breeze blowing the curtain in, and outside you hear the rattle and mutter of the city, as though it were making comments on the matter in a hoarse undertone. A broad white bed is near the wall, the doctor and nurse are sometimes in and out of the room, and on the pillows is a thin white face with the hair drawn neatly back. The lips are moving with a faint sound, and the eyes look out softly and peacefully, at me kneeling beside, and my father sitting with his chin on his crutch and his beard rumpled. There is a lost look in his eyes, wide and lonely; like a man under whom a ship is going down at sunset, who sees the sun for the last time and the red clouds doing his burial service. My mother is speaking; her voice is not like any sound that seems natural to the earth, but thin, creeping, and slow, like the mists you see in the early morning that cling and whisper to slack sails. “You were always my big boy, Tom,” she says, “like Ben, only bigger.” “Ben's growing,” says my father, hoarsely. “You'll not remember it against me, Ben, for it was not I. And he shall go to sea, Tom, remember, like all the Bensons and Crees, all sailing folk and proud to be, proud to be all sailing folk. But I'm glad you're not a woman, Ben, for the sea's hard on women, very hard.” When I went to school in the brick schoolhouse on Willet Street I studied Latin in a green-covered book of selections, which for the most part I greatly disliked. There was a passage ending with these words, “sunt lacrimæ rerum”; and what “lacrimæ rerum” means I find less easy to say in common English than I did then, when we called it “the tears of things,” and appeared to satisfy the master with that. But now I suppose it might mean, there is a hidden sorrow in the middle of God's universe that likely has been there always. However it may be, I suppose it quite beyond a plain man to describe his idea of the matter. But whenever I think of those words, “lacrimæ rerum,” they sound to me as if spoken in my mother's voice, sighing, plaintive, and moving away from me; or as if she might have meant the same thing in saying, “The sea's hard on women, very hard.” The wind blew the curtain in so that it wavered in the room. “Lacrimæ rerum. The sea's hard on women,” a kind of sighing sound that moved far and far away. It was now come to the latter part of November, and about the middle of a certain morning I heard Tony calling my name. At my coming he winked in a manner to make me think he knew all about something, only that he always winked to show his knowingness, whether he knew anything or not. He pointed with his thumb to the door of the inn parlour, where I went in, and found my father sitting with the three strangers.