Job Whitmarsh was never seen again, alow or aloft, that night or ever after. I was telling the tale to our parson this summer,--he's a fair-minded chap, the parson, in spite of a little natural leaning to strawberries, which I always take in very good part,--and he turned it about in his mind some time. "If it was the boy," says he,--"and I can't say as I see any reason especial why it shouldn't have been,--I've been wondering what his spiritooal condition was. A soul in hell,"--the parson believes in hell, I take it, because he can't help himself; but he has that solemn, tender way of preaching it as makes you feel he wouldn't have so much as a chicken get there if he could help it,--"a lost soul," says the parson (I don't know as I get the words exact),--"a soul that has gone and been and got there of its own free will and choosing would be as like as not to haul another soul alongside if he could. Then again, if the mate's time had come, you see, and his chances were over, why, that's the will of the Lord, and it's hell for him whichever side of death he is, and nobody's fault but hisn; and the boy might be in the good place, and do the errand all the same. That's just about it, Brown," says he. "A man goes his own gait, and, if he won't go to heaven, he _won't_, and the good God himself can't help it. He throws the shining gates all open wide, and he never shut them on any poor fellow as would have entered in, and he never, never will." Which I thought was sensible of the parson, and very prettily put. There's Molly frying flapjacks now, and flapjacks won't wait for no man, you know, no more than time and tide, else I should have talked till midnight, very like, to tell the time we made on that trip home, and how green the harbor looked a sailing up, and of Molly and the baby coming down to meet me in a little boat that danced about (for we cast a little down the channel), and how she climbed up a laughing and a crying all to once, about my neck, and how the boy had grown, and how when he ran about the deck (the little shaver had his first pair of boots on that very afternoon) I bethought me of the other time, and of Molly's words, and of the lad we'd left behind us in the purple days. Just as we were hauling up, I says to my wife: "Who's that old lady setting there upon the lumber, with a gray bunnet, and a gray ribbon on her cap?" For there was an old lady there, and I saw the sun all about her, and all on the blazing yellow boards, and I grew a little dazed and dazzled. "I don't know," said Molly, catching onto me a little close. "She comes there every day. They say she sits and watches for her lad as ran away." So then I seemed to know, as well as ever I knew afterwards, who it was. And I thought of the dog. And the green rocking-chair. And the book that Whitmarsh wadded his old gun with. And the front-door, with the boy a walking in.