This morning, at four o'clock, I left my ship as
soon as she had hauled into the dock, and hurried up home. The house
was shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn't know what to do, and I sat
down on the doorstep to wait till the neighbors woke up, to ask them
what had become of my family. And the first one come out he told me my
wife had been dead a year and a half, and the baby I'd never seen, with
her; and one of my boys was dead; and he didn't know where the rest of
the children was, but he'd heard two of the little ones was with a
family in the city."
The man mentioned these things with the half-apologetical air observable
in a certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to
confess the infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your
sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of
having it thrown back upon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk
so far as to say, "Pretty rough!" when the stranger paused; and perhaps
these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart. The man's
quivering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark
face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn
cheeks. This demonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to
stand for the passion of tears into which the emotional races fall at
such times. He opened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on:--
"I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found the
children.
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