And there, incredibly, plucky little Mother, who could not have believed that she would not be in the world to serve any one of them while they had need of her, sickened with the deadly cholera and died. And Father, heartsick and alone, is sailing southward once more, this time for home. As the pilot takes him downstream, he is writing the son and daughter at Cape Cod. “I am seated here alone in my cabin where your mother and I have spent many pleasant hours and taken sweet counsel together, with everything around me to remind me of her. Here sets her chair, and there her trunk and clothes and everything as she left it.” (We wonder if the “slips” she had taken at Melbourne and Sydney are blooming yet.) “Oh, my dear, dear children, how much I have to feel and suffer. Your mother was thinking much of coming home to you again, but her spirit is with those in heaven. She spoke much of Nancy and Clanrick before she died, and said be sure to give Nancy my watch, and buy one for Clanrick and tell him it was his mother’s request. I hope you will find a home at the Cape somewhere till my return. Clanrick, be a good boy and kind to your sister; and try to cheer one another up in your heavy affliction. I soon expect to discharge the pilot. Good-morning, my dear children. God bless you. Your own afflicted Father.” Father seems to have been of no such indomitable fibre as Mother. Perhaps for too many decades the sea had had its will of him, and for too many times, before this last voyage that had been so beautifully companioned, he had suffered the loneliness of long months afloat. Yet Father, in his youth, had been one of the gayest lads in town; within an hour of his arrival from sea, he was in and out of every house there, with a joke for the old ladies, and a new story for the cap’ns, a song for the girls, and a new style for the lads. Then he had taken on a steady pilot in Susan, his wife, and had steered straight through all their years together. He adored his children, and gave them perhaps more pleasures than he could well afford; for somehow, although he was an able captain and trader, riches had never come his way. Men said he was a free-spender, and ought to have saved. And now, in his broken state, after a few weeks with the children in the old home among the willows and lilacs, he must be off again to earn money for them all, this time on a coasting voyage, Boston to “New-Orleens.” And at sea, with far too much time for reflection, he is writing his loved daughter: “I hoped I never should be drifting about the ocean again, but here I am, and no one but my Heavenly Father knows what my destiny is. When I look back on the past two years, it seems all a dream: our dear Freeman pining away in a foreign land, and longing to get home once more, poor boy. And your mother in her last moments perfectly calm and serene, not one murmur or complaint. I have tried to bear up the best I could, but it has been dreadful hard.