"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold vinegar--something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade, we prospered, and I'm a landsman--but I know her. Sometimes if my bad toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They float by me orderly, no crowding--hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one--Amyas Holt maybe, that was first officer of the ship _Marigold_ and would never sing except he was stone cold sober, but I _have_ heard him sing, marry have I. Went down with the _Marigold_ off the Bermudas--all hands.... Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women, children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's coming now?--but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring. Is not the land fair?" "Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away. "Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything, dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the Line, a run to Recife in the ship _Providence_--most of his teeth fallen from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered, Ben, this is the first time you've seen _Artemis_ afloat. When she left the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed." Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing fever--whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.