again, I turned and saw Dan’s lips bitten, and his cheek white, and his
eyes like stars, and Mr. Gabriel’s face fallen forward in his hands, and
he shaking with quick sobs; and as for Faith,——Faith, she had dropped
asleep, and one arm was thrown above her head, and the other lay where it
had slipped from Mr. Gabriel’s loosened grasp. There’s a contagion, you
know, in such things, but Faith was never of the catching kind.
Well, this wasn’t what we’d come for,——turning all out-doors into a
church,——though what’s a church but a place of God’s presence? and for my
part, I never see high blue sky and sunshine without feeling that. And
all of a sudden there came a school of mackerel splashing and darkening
and curling round the boat, after the bait we’d thrown out on anchoring.
’Twould have done you good to see Dan just at that moment; you’d have
realized what it was to have a calling. He started up, forgetting
everything else, his face all flushed, his eyes like coals, his mouth
tight and his tongue silent; and how many hooks he had out I’m sure I
don’t know, but he kept jerking them in by twos and threes, and finally
they bit at the bare barb and were taken without any bait at all, just
as if they’d come and asked to be caught. Mr. Gabriel, he didn’t pay
any attention at first, but Dan called to him to stir himself, and so
gradually he worked back into his old mood; but he was more still and
something sad all the rest of the morning. Well, when we’d gotten about
enough, and they were dying in the boat there, as they cast their scales,
like the iris, we put in-shore; and building a fire, we cooked our own
dinner and boiled our own coffee. Many’s the icy winter night I’ve
wrapped up Dan’s bottle of hot coffee in rolls on rolls of flannel, that
he might drink it hot and strong far out at sea in a wherry at daybreak!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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