For all she smiled when she said that--and in John's opinion she should 'a' been a happy woman to be able to say things like that--for all that there was what John called a melancholy in her voice and a sort of vapor in her eyes when she said it; and, looking after her making her lonesome way over to the big house with all the lighted windows, he couldn't help thinking that for all they said she was such a boss of a woman--for all that--there ought to be somebody more than a lot of butlers and maids and cooks to meet her at the door. There is the story of Peter's stop ashore, as old man Flaxley, John Ferguson, and Fred Lichens know it. Fred had to add that he couldn't see where Peter's stop ashore ever hurt him any. "Certainly," said Fred, "since the baby came, he has been making fishing history in the _Celia_!" He looked over to Mr. Duncan when he said that. Mr. Duncan wasn't deaf. "A little stop ashore never harmed anybody," retorted Mr. Duncan--"it's the stopping ashore too long!" The Sea-Birds It was fine summer weather, and John asked me how about a swordfishing trip for a change. I said all right, and we got a chance in the _Henriette_, and went down that same morning to Duncan's Wharf to go aboard. The _Henriette_ lay ready to go to sea, and John and I stood on the string-piece and looked down on her deck and up at her mastheads. A lumper hanging around Duncan's was standing near us. I never knew a dock lumper that couldn't tell you all about everything. "She is weak-built and pretty deep--I don't like to see them so deep," said this lumper. "And down by the head, too." "Maybe you'd be deep if you were on'y thirteen tons net register an' thirty tons of ice in you," said John. And a proper answer. A man should always have a good word--even if he don't more than half believe it himself--for the craft he's going to sea in. At the same time I was thinking that I was having an eye to a new, able fresh-halibuter--a big ninety-ton vessel--across the slip. I like the big fellows to go to sea in. I said so to John. "A big, able brute--yes, boy. But that big brute--Lard Gard, she'd look sweet, wouldn't she, chasin' swordfish in the shoal water south o' Georges. She's a good little boat, the _Henriette_--and a pretty name," said John. It was a fresh southwesterly, and a day to make a man over, as we passed on by Eastern Point. Just to look at the young blue seas was life, and the soft salt air was a cure for whatever blue feeling a man might have had hooked into himself ashore.