“D’ you know the Latin name of these plums, Hosea?” demanded the keeper. Ho Ha looked very serious. “My bad mark in school was always in Latin!” The keeper winked at Mermaid. Ho Ha had gone to a little red schoolhouse, winters, until he was thirteen. “It’s _prunus maritima_,” he reminded the scholar. “That’s almost calling ’em maritime prunes.” “They’re commoner than prunes with us. Do they get the name from being served in sailors’ boarding-houses?” “You were shanghaied to sea, once, weren’t you, Hosea?” “Sixteen when it happened. On South Street, New York. Froze my feet standing a trick at the wheel off Cape Horn. Mate came into the fo’c’s’le and grabbed one foot and twisted it until I howled; then he pulled me out on deck,” said the Coast Guard, reminiscently. “I’d always been sort of crazy about the sea from a kid.” He emptied his pickings into a big basket, straightened up a moment, resumed his picking, and said: “I worshipped, just about, an uncle, my mother’s brother, who’d been to sea all his life. And when I was a shaver on our farm up in the hills in the middle of the Island I slept in the attic. Every night, Cap’n, as I got in bed I could see through a little attic window, right over the tree tops Fire Island light. ’Twas maybe twenty miles away. ’Twould show, just a faint spark, then kindle, then glow bright, then flame like--like a beacon. Just for a few seconds; then ’twould die out. Occulting. It seemed to beckon to me. I was only a kid and there was something wonderful and friendly about that light! And secret, too. It seemed to be signalling just to me, a little chap in an ice-cold attic on a lonely hill farm. Seemed as if that light said: ‘Come on, Hosea Hand! I’m set here to tell you that there’s a great world out here waiting for you! I’m an outpost! There’s lands and peoples and adventures and ten thousand leagues of ocean--and there’s life, the greatest adventure of all! Hurry up and grow up, Hosea Hand!’ And then all shivering and excited, I’d crouch under the big, pieced quilt and watch that light come and glow, shine and dim, flame and go out--until I’d fall asleep and dream I was out there where it called me!” The little girl listened, fascinated. She had stopped picking, and her childish breast rose and fell with quick breathing. Cap’n Smiley picked perfunctorily and once his hand closed so tightly about the coloured plums that they crushed them. Ho Ha worked steadily and after a few moments he went on: “I was fourteen when my father died. The year before I’d quit school to help work the farm. In those days there wasn’t any science called agriculture. We just tilled the soil. My father was always trying to get more land; I used to wonder what for, when it was such slavery to work it! Maybe he suspicioned the day would come when we’d understand the soil and know how to make it yield without back-breaking and heart-break.” “Your brother is pretty comfortably off, Hosea.”