"You've been a great comfort and pleasure, Rhoda," he told her. "I only wish Gerrit could marry someone like you--" "But who would give him sons," she interrupted. "It's just as you say about him, and I've always been uneasy. God knows what he won't do--on land. William's a great deal happier, for all his brother's humor. I joke William, but he's very satisfactory and solid. He'll make port if he doesn't get tied up with newfangled notions. Why, it stands to reason that a ship built like a knife would double up in the seas off the Falklands." "He has a lot of confidence in Mr. McKay." "McKay is a good man unsettled. The _May Broughton_ is a fine barque, and his packet ships are as seaworthy as any, but--" his indignation increased so that he sputtered, and Rhoda laughed. "Now your girls," he added, "fine models, all of them, plenty of beam, work in any kind of weather." "That's very complimentary," she assured him, rising. "You mustn't worry about Gerrit. Remember, my predictions never fail." When she had gone his mind returned to storms he had safely weathered--the gray gales of Cape Horn, black hurricanes and the explosive tempests in eastern straits and seas. He took from the drawer of a bookcase with glass doors set in geometrical pattern a thin volume bound in black boards. A paper label was inscribed in a small, carefully formed script, "Journal of my intended voyage from Salem to the East Indies in the Ship _Woodbine_." He opened at random: "Comes in with strong wind from SSE with rain squalls. Very ugly sea on. Double reefed the Topsails, reefed the courses and furled the mainsail. At six p.m. shipped a very heavy sea that carried away the bulwarks on the larboard quarter and stove those on the starboard quarter and amidships ... upper cabin filled with water. Through the night strong gales.... Lightning at all points of the compass." The memory of this night, six days out from Manilla to Hong Kong, was clearer than the actuality of the room in which he sat, an old man with his activity, his strength, his manhood, far behind him, a hulk. "At ten split the mainsail in pieces. Close reefed the fore and double reefed the main-topsails. Rising gales and heavy head sea. Shipping a great quantity of water and leaking considerable. Bent a new mainsail and set it. Reefed and set the jib. Pumping near two thousand strokes an hour. "October seventh, Sunday. Comes in with strong gales and a heavy head sea. Both officers crippled and man laid up. Through the night the same. Leaking badly. A great number of junks in sight ... and so at five p.m. come to anchor." He had been a good man then, sixteen days on the quarter-deck without going below; insensible to ice or fever or weariness. He had been autocratic, too; and had his boy servant carrying areca nuts, chunam and tobacco in two silk bags, another with a fan and a third holding an umbrella. Such things were all over now, he understood, in this driving age.