The Old Woman

YOUNG Caroline trod majestically into the sunny parlor, balancing on her head a round brown box. This was a scheme to attract the attention of old Caroline and lead up naturally to the matter of suggesting the charming box as a token of esteem from the old to the young. However, old Caroline was both unseeing and, in the main, unseen, for two veiny hands held outspread before her the Bath Daily Times; her feet, bony and jointy in those thin leather shoes that old women manage to buy somewhere, rested flatly on a red wooden footstool that served her comfort when she sat at the window in the highbacked rocker; her lean old legs were draped in a cotton gown printed with red forget-me-nots. The light, striking through a single thickness of paper, revealed the fact that she studied the inside of the back page, devoted to news of Boothbay, Popham, Winnegance, Woolwich, Wiscasset, and Dresden. The breeze from the Kennebec rustled the curtain against the paper; there was no other sound.

Baffled, young Caroline flung herself on the old sofa, resting her neck on the back and stretching long legs out into the middle of the hideous carpet. Idly she polished the flat box on her thigh and contemplated the familiar Bailey gods. The carpet; on the opposite wall the oil painting, not so bad as some, of the ship Mary Spaulding, and a print, in a chipped green frame, of the bark Arethusa; a cut-velvet picture and a little mirror in a mahogany frame with an intricately cut outline; a round framed photograph of Winchester Cathedral and another of an Indian temple. On the white mantel there were two beautiful Chinese vases and, in sociable juxtaposition, a large and sinfully ugly red-pottery pig which held a mass of goldenglow; an old fat Buddha sat there, too, beside a sandglass. Above young Caroline’s dark head hung a gilt-framed mirror with a colored farm scene at its top, a mirror known to be capable of performing wonders in the way of distorting even the most symmetrical features. The chairs were old and severe, and thoroughly disapproved of a black-andsilver lacquered table that gleamed wanton from a corner.

Somewhere a clock in a great hurry banged six times in bursts of two. Old Caroline began a struggle to get the paper to collapse into its creases; the accursed single sheet in the middle seized the opportunity to slide out and skid across the floor, only to be captured and returned to the fold by young Caroline. Old Caroline vented small irritated sounds while she strove with the frenzied Times, but, at last subduing it with some well-placed blows, she laid it on the arm of the sofa and folded her hands on her beflowered stomach. She became aware of young Caroline alert in the offing.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Where’s Joel?’

‘He’s out on the porch. Look, Aunt Caroline, may I have this box? I found it in that bureau in my room. It has n’t anything in it but some old hattrimming.’ She crushed it to her breast, wrenching off the tight cover. ‘Those were pretty little birds. Look, auntie.’ Old Caroline, stretching a shaky hand, took the box into her lap. There were three dried skins of birds, with heads iridescent and gorgeous; one imagined them rushing brilliantly from flower to flower in a tropic forest. She smoothed their shining crowns, the two that were splendidly green and the one that was brown with a golden cap.

‘Did you have them on one of those absurd hats people used to wear?' inquired young Caroline. ‘They look like real birds, don’t they? I don’t see how anyone could put them on a hat.'

‘Hat!’ Old Caroline’s voice was faintly surprised. Her eyes grew dreamy. ‘No, I never had them on a hat—’ A long silence fell. She sat very still in the tall black rocker with the little long-dead birds in her old hand and the round brown box in her lap. She was old and serene; her thin gray hair was neatly disposed to cover, as far as possible, the pink scalp; her absent eyes were a faded blue, beset by a million wrinkles. Her life, one felt, had been placidly happy.

Old Caroline was young Caroline in that far time, and she had been married a year and three days. Hot and miserable and uncomfortable she lay on her back in the wide built-in bed with the thick posts reaching to the ceiling of the cabin; the light in the outer room dimly illumined the stateroom, and it gleamed on the brass rim of the compass bolted to the ceiling over the bed; the compass card bobbed and bobbed with the weary plunge of the ship. She could not read the compass and the light was faint, but it seemed to her that the card flopped back and forth and back and forth across the vertical black line that was the ship — back and forth, back and forth. With every aimless lunge in the swell she heard the lifeless flap of canvas and the jerk of heavy yards. On the poop deck just above her head the wheel creaked unceasingly, and the mate’s soft footfalls padded across the deck and back, across and back, across and back; from time to time he stopped and she knew he leaned his elbows on the house and stared at the stars and the dangling telltale and the lazy sails; then he began again his endless pacing. For an eternity she had heard these same noises.

The mate jogged down the starboard side. The man at the wheel began to sing softly — it must be Mads. Only yesterday morning when she went on deck she had found Mads at the wheel and had said to him, ‘Just a few days more, Mads!' He had looked quickly at her, and cast his vigilant blue eyes down at the compass, murmuring, ‘Yasss, ma’am.’ Rise and fall, creak and groan, flap, flap. Even if they were a week later than Joel had estimated at the beginning as the very limit of a long passage, there would still be time for her. At dinner Mr. Adams and Joel no longer bothered to exchange their figures on the day’s run, which was encouraging. But dinner itself was tiresome with the flour almost gone, the butter and sugar all gone, and beans their staple diet; Joel fumed like an old woman over the food. Well, it probably was n’t so good for the baby, but they would be arriving soon.

She rolled hotly over on her side and stared at Joel sitting under the hanging lamp. Every night he read like that. After they had finished reading aloud from the sea-worn green Shakespeare and she had gone to bed, he still sat out there and read. Now he leaned back, gazing across the cabin with knitted brows. As she watched he half-closed the book to feel in a pocket for a pipe, and she recognized the tan leather cover of the book. Old Bowditch! Why, he must know old Bowditch by heart!

‘Oh, Joel!’ she called softly. He started. ‘ What are you doing ? ‘

‘ Reading.’

‘What are you reading?’

‘ Oh—A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,’ he responded. She was on the point of remarking in her surprise that the Shakespeare was green, but it hardly seemed worth while. It was doubtless some joke of Joel’s.

‘Will you get me a drink, Joel? I ‘m so hot.’ He rose instantly, laying the book on the wide arm of the chair, unconscious of her observation. Why, that was n’t old Bowditch, either; old Bowditch had a broken back sewed up with string. What was that book? She rolled back into her own corner as Joel stepped back from the forward cabin with the water. She had seen it somewhere, a thick tan book with a wide red name-piece on the back binding. She drank the warmish water gratefully. Joel was a good boy to her, but if she had known that a bridal trip around the world would end in discomfort like this —

That was the medicine book! That was what he read every night with such grimness.

It explained everything. Over on the chart table the chart, which used to be held open all the time with the parallel rulers and the dividers and the corner of the chronometer, lay curled up tight in the provoking way of charts, discouraging to investigation. So Joel thought it was going to happen at sea. She was frightened. . . .

Old Caroline rubbed the box. ‘The comprador gave it to me in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘On my wedding trip. It had a beautiful silk embroidered handkerchief in it. A big silk handkerchief, a yard square, I guess, embroidered in flowers, soft and lovely. I kept Joel’s father’s watch in it, which Joel prized. He never used it at sea, of course. It was n’t much good, anyway.’

It turned out to be a rather good baby, not very big, but very slippery. Caroline found herself constantly snatching him just in the nick of time by a fat leg or an arm; but he was perfectly good-natured about that and about almost everything except his meals. Joel became a very clever nurse in a short time, and exhibited his son to the mate and the second mate. The steward begged permission to take him out to show to the men, and as he claimed to be an adept in the dandling of babies, — one pictured him as juggling three or four babies at once, keeping them constantly in motion in the air without the least slip, — the favor was granted and he withdrew, carrying the little red pig in a comfortingly professional manner. He returned in triumph, bearing gifts and compliments and promises of more gifts. Ben had almost completed a particularly neat Turk’s head. Old Bill had presented an Alaskan salmonspear, five feet long. The carpenter had begun forthwith on a labyrinthine rattle; Tom was doing some woodcarving, and very mysterious he was about it, too — the steward thought, sniffing, that it was going to be a doll. The bo’s’n, ready for any occasion, presented a very useful walrus tusk. A pair of ivory dice, loaded, had been rejected by the steward, in his official capacity, as an unsuitable gift for a moral infant,.

Joel set the baby down in the logbook with the utmost exactness as to latitude and longitude. He marked a red star in the margin opposite the entry.

In a few days Joel calmed down after his ordeal and Caroline began to recover somewhat from hers. Then, for no apparent reason, everyone got into a state of nerves. Caroline, not greatly interested, suspected that some old wretch of a seaman in a bad temper had said babies on a ship brought mean weather, and so all the silly sailors were wrought up over that. Certainly the sails still slatted and pounded, the ship lumbered about, and, though they were far beyond the equator, it grew hotter day by day. Caroline could not sleep much for the heat and the requirements of her offspring, and Joel seemed not to sleep at all. Repeatedly at night he went on deck ‘ to get a breath of air.'

One day Caroline took a short walk. It had been excessively hot in the cabin, but nevertheless she felt rather well, as she had not suffered any nervous shocks that day from having her little greased pig try to elude her and dash his ten-day-old brains on the deck. So she wobbled along through the forward cabin to the high doorsill that kept the bad-weather seas from rolling across the main deck and making themselves unwelcome in the cabin. This obstacle she awkwardly surmounted, stepping across the grating outside on to the deck. It was like a griddle; the black stuff between the planks oozed up soft and gummy and stuck to her shoes. The broiling sun menaced her, and her legs unhappily turned to macaroni. Her dazzled eyes were caught by a group of men on the fo’c’sle doing some extraordinary thing with the big boat — painting it, perhaps. As she turned to flee from the glare to the dimness of the cabin she saw in the mizzen rigging a long string of limp gay flags — there was probably a ship in sight. Possibly they were going to borrow some potatoes or something. She reached the haven of the big chair just as Joel’s deliberate steps sounded on the companionway stairs.

‘I went on deck, Joel,’ she volunteered, much elated. 4 But it was so hot I did n’t stay.’ He filled a pipe, sitting down on the ugly red divan. His glance at her as he sucked the flame of the match down to the bowl of the pipe was very gentle.

‘Is there a ship near?’ she pursued. Joel might sit there for a year and not think to tell her! ‘I saw the flags. Are you speaking her?’

‘No,’ he answered slowly. ‘ It’s only a signal. The ship is on fire, Caroline.’

It came like a blow; for a moment it seemed impossible that those quiet words had actually been uttered. Her eyes grew to be huge blue spots on the pallor of her face — staring blue spots. ‘Don’t be frightened, dear,’ he murmured. (Her pride, indignant, administered a sharp prod to her courage. ‘Anybody who can have babies at sea can be shipwrecked creditably,’ it admonished. She must say some bold words.)

‘Shall — shall we have to leave the ship? ‘ she quavered. (‘ Now, could there be a more idiotic question?’ remonstrated pride. ‘Everyone will think you are a fool and a coward besides.’)

‘The hatches are battened down,’ he replied. She did not know what that meant. ‘But I think we’ll have to abandon the ship to-night or tomorrow. You’d better get a few things together. This is n’t what I would have chosen for a wedding trip for you, Caroline!’ The cry broke unexpectedly through his teeth, and he dropped his head in his big brown hands. His pipe fell and scattered embers about. ' I am so sorry,’ he muttered, struggling to regain his admirable calm.

‘There, there, Joel,’she comforted. ‘ I don’t mind.’ (‘ Now that sounds better,’ remarked her pride to her courage; ‘shipwrecks are nothing to babies.’)

So she gathered a few things. She arrayed herself in her best black silk, made for her wedding outfit, according to the traditional New England custom. She took the round wooden box containing Joel’s father’s watch carefully folded in the rich silk handkerchief. She collected a few meagre supplies for the baby, some vaseline and what not. Then a brown cashmere shawl, and she was ready — tremendously composed, she flattered herself, with her hands and knees trembling and her heart pounding her to bits. Joel was making some leisurely preparations, too; he put together in a neat pile his sextant, some instruments, a chart, a few bottles from the medicine chest, the green Shakespeare and old Bowditch, a big new oilskin coat from the slop chest, the ship’s papers, the logbook.

‘What do you take the Shakespeare for?’ babbled Caroline.

‘Why, I take it everywhere!’ responded faithful old Joel.

All the afternoon Caroline listened to strange sounds of preparations, holding her fat pig in her arms for fear she might abandon ship and forget him, not having had him so long as Joel had had that old green book. The steward came and went in the pantry, and Joel conversed briefly with him in low tones about condensed milk and hard-tack. There were unusual creakings and thumpings outside the forward cabin windows, which Caroline, very erect and ready, opined to be related to the boat davits. She wondered how they’d get the big boat down off the fo’c’sle. She would like to know how near the land they were, but she hesitated to ask lest Joel think her frightened; she was just as calm as anybody, she was sure. Calmer.

In the morning they took the final steps. Caroline sat for the last time on the poop in the barrel chair, with her baby and her bundle, like an immigrant woman, and watched everything. Three boats there were — Joel said that any one of them was as big, almost, as Christopher Columbus’s ship, but Caroline knew better than to believe that. The second mate was the first to go; he came up, with the ship’s cat under his arm, to say good-bye and to shake hands with Caroline. Joel gave him some sailing directions for the mainland.

‘You can’t miss it,’ he said. ‘Of course, it’s farther than Juan Fernandez, but you can’t, navigate. You’ve got the younger men in your boat — you may have to push them some unless you get picked up. Mr. Adams and I will make for Juan Fernandez.’ They shook hands, and presently the boat floated off from the side of the ship. Wisps and ribbons of smoke were coming through the deck near the main hatch. How far from land could they be, thought Caroline.

Men were dropping into the second boat. Mr. Adams shook hands with Caroline and the baby and with Joel. He had Joel’s own chronometer in his hand, and he uttered a parting protest.

‘The ship’s is all right,’ responded Joel. ‘You will have to push your crew a little with your provisions. You may get picked up. If not, we’ll see you later. Good luck!’ The mate’s old brown felt hat vanished. They must be a long, long way from land.

Two or three sailors got into the third boat. Joel took Caroline’s bundle and the baby, and shortly she saw the bundle disappear over the rail. Joel gave the baby to Mads, and Caroline in a sudden frenzy of anxiety hastened to the side; but Mads managed the baby as if climbing up and down the tall sides of burning ships with slippery babies were the regular work of an able seaman. The sailors ran up and down like monkeys. Then it was Caroline’s turn; she hated those up-and-down wiggly ladders.

She crouched on the rail, clinging to Joel’s hand on one side and to a tarred black rope on the other, and peered outward and downward at a diminutive boat bouncing below and at the white specks that were the faces of seamen gazing up. At Joel’s command one of these began to mount the ladder.

‘Turn around, Caroline.’ That was the pinch — to let go of the things you had hold of and turn around quickly enough to snatch at them again with the other hand, and to go down that ladder backward with your face to the black ship, like a woodpecker — terrifying. ‘Turn around, Caroline.’ She turned. She was successful; she clutched Joel with her right hand now, and stretched her foot down, down. Where was it going? Why did n’t it light on something? Oh, there! ‘Take hold of the ropes. There — step down.’ This was an endless ladder. She tried to look down between the ladder and her body to find the next step, but her skirt caught up on every step and she had to keep taking one hand off to brush it down decently. Why, she had put her black silk dress on over her gray one — how could she have done that? ‘Keep hold of the rope!'

The places for her feet were farther apart every time. Joel said something, but not to her. She lifted her face and saw him miles above her. ‘Go on, Caroline. Step down.’ She put her blind foot down, down — oh! A hand caught the feeling foot, pulled gently, and placed it on a step. A big red hand covered with shiny hair appeared below her own on the rope, and a gentle surrounding pressure told her that she did not have to finish her acrobatic feats alone — a red hand always beside her and an unseen hand that found a place for her nervous feet. If she ever went to sea again she would practise on ladders first. Another step, another, and her foot touched something hard that yet sank sickeningly under her — that was the boat. She turned enormous blue eyes over her shoulder, and many hands reached to steady her, and many grins greeted her from seamen who in their remarkable way seemed to be holding the boat to the ship’s side by the palms of their hands.

Now she sat down in the stern of the boat, exhausted in mind and body. The baby, wrapped in the brown shawl, lay screaming energetically on the deck boards. There were five sailors. Why did n’t Joel come? Where was he? An uncle of Caroline’s had gone down with his ship. Joel could n’t mean to stay on board! He had said once — But it was all right, after all. There were still some men on board. Everywhere she looked now she saw little whiffs of smoke, just like a firecracker about to explode. Someone dropped an umbrella like a harpoon into the boat, and the sailors laughed gruffly. Four more sailors came down, monkeylike, and then they waited, waited. Then two more. After an interminable time Joel descended the dangling ladder, as casually as he might a staircase, with some papers in one hand and a bundle under his arm.

‘Shove off,’ he said.

The ship very soon was leaking gray mist all over like a smoky stove, and anon it leaped into flame, fire running up the tarred rigging, chasing the colored flags that were not needed any longer to tell that the ship Mary Spaulding was in peril by fire. Wood and rope and canvas, pitch and tar and oil — they make a gallant conflagration! Thick black smoke and orange flame! Suddenly Caroline wept. The poor ship! It was so small and forlorn, sitting there on the flat sea and burning up; and, even though it had behaved in a most untrustworthy way, a boat, just a plain boat with no cover, was in comparison utterly contemptible.

This boat had a mast and a small sail, but for a day or two there was no wind, only sun, and Joel made the men take turns laboring with four heavy oars. They were far from skillful at first, but after a little practice they managed very well, though not , to be sure, like a racing crew. They grunted a good deal, and during the day they became simply impossibly red in the face; but so did Caroline. Mads was a sort of officer and took turns with Joel sitting in the stern and steering. The boat barely moved. It rested on the light-blue hot water like a double boiler, and she and Joel and Mads and the fat pig and all the sailors were being steamed in it like rice; and swelling, too, like rice. The sky was the bright blue cover of the boiler, and the sun made one red-hot spot on the cover. When the wind at last came, it dried up everybody’s face and hands, and the sun and wind together burned and cracked the skin like a paper put over a cake in the oven.

The first two or three days nothing happened. And after that nothing happened but the wind; however, Caroline had only fragmentary recollections of the later days. For a long time, for hours, she sat on the hard seat till she ached in every bone. Then she stood up; but it was difficult to keep her balance and it made her feel like Washington Crossing the Delaware, and tired her, too, and she sat down, laughing foolishly. No one else ever laughed. The sailors who were not rowing lolled about red and sweating; those who rowed waved back and forth and back and forth and gave out more gusts of heat to the already hot air. Caroline sat beneath her umbrella and peeped out at them surreptitiously and occasionally intercepted a returning stare. There was nothing to do. Time could scarcely be said to pass at all. It was hard to sit still so long on the wooden seat. Everyone edged about imperceptibly. Caroline shifted now to this position and now to another, and always a board or seam or edge began to dig into some soft piece of flesh until she simply had to move again. She tried sitting in the bottom of the boat, and all the hard places came most heavenly in different spots, so that she dozed against the edge of the seat until that hurt her back; and then she tried the seat once more. Oh, oh! Joel was the only one who had any change — except Mads and the baby and the sailors who rowed the boat. Joel stood up and took the sun in the glare of noonday; he sat clown and figured and looked at the chronometer and the chart, and he penciled a point on the chart and measured with the longlegged brass dividers and the parallel rulers; he scowled over the bright white paper. Mads steered and watched Joel, who hunched above the chart and pondered or else napped a little — the heat made one drowsy and the boards kept one awake. He talked in low tones to Mads, whose answers were all alike monotonous. ‘Yass, sir, a little.’ ‘ Yass, sir, iss far.’ ‘ Yass, sir, I tink sso, ssir.’ Only a thousand times he said ‘ Yassssir, ‘ and the s’s hissed like a wet finger on a flatiron. It made her sleepy.

After she had been nodding and waking and changing her position, dozing and waking, for hours, the sun was still high in the sky. Under the protection of the umbrella she fed the baby, giggling hysterically with that shelter toward the supposedly baffled company. It felt Mother Goose-ish; but, try as she would, the exact verses dealing with the woman who lived under an umbrella eluded her, though she recollected other surprising situations which had been ably recorded. She appealed to Joel. Joel, however, murmured that once when he was a wild young man, the second mate of the Orion, he had been in a Black Sea port, and he and another wild young second mate from another ship had gone on a jaunt to a neighboring beach to discover the truth of the rumor that men and women went in bathing together stark naked. Yes, they did. It was true. Very sensible and matter-ofcourse. For forty years Caroline remembered Joel sitting before her, brown and serious, with his old hat pulled low, staring at her and the fat pig and telling them that tale.

The tedium of heat and aches was broken at last by sunset and a repast of hard-tack with a meagre dose of water. Joel bullied her to drink some condensed milk; just a little bit, he urged, because it was good for her and the baby. Why was it good for her to drink something she loathed? He wasn’t a doctor. She would not; and then she did. The awful bluish sweetness that made her so thirsty — gulp, gul-lup — two choking spoonfuls. Ugh! She gnawed on the hard-tack like a dog on a bone; she kept a bit in her lap and crunched it from time to time. In the middle of the night she chewed on it and tried to sleep. She could not get comfortable lying down on the boards, for they were not the right shape, and she was not comfortable either when she sat up and leaned against the seat; she could not be comfortable anywhere because her bones and her figure were always in the way. It was terribly public, too, and what good was an umbrella that bounded out of one’s hand if one dozed off when one sat and was quite inadequate when one lay? Joel slept and Mads sat at the tiller and crooned to the baby, who was trying to cry. Mads went away and Joel sat at the tiller. A hundred times in the night the wild animal that she had borne screamed for food, — he was n’t just a pig, but a ravening wolf, — and she hid herself with him in the brown cashmere shawl and was thankful for the darkness.

A hot dawn and no wind. All day raged the struggle about the condensed milk. She threw a can overboard, which angered Joel, who called her a savage and a pig; so, contrite, she consumed three large nauseating spoonfuls, even to lapping the spoon, and fell to on her hard-tack to take away the vile taste.

She dozed and waked and held the baby, glistening with vaseline, on her lap under the umbrella in the fierce sunshine. The baby clamored to eat every living instant, so finally Joel held him, or Mads. Peering out from time to time from the shade of the shawl under which she sat on the bottom of the boat, she viewed an unnautical tableau: either Mads or Joel seated under an umbrella at the tiller ropes, cleverly balancing on his knees a disagreeable red infant that Joel strove to soothe with ‘Camp Town Races’ and to which Mads crooned, in the ribs and trucks of a once melodious voice, his repertoire of sad Scandinavian tunes. Whenever, after napping for an age, she wakened because the boards were so merciless and her legs had gone to sleep, she found the sun still standing overhead. Sometimes Joel whispered commands to the men, and behind her she heard their hoarse answering whispers. It was fantastic. Usually when Joel wanted something done he spoke firmly to the mate or to the second mate, and they at once sped roaring up and down the deck and the men ran and shouted, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and ‘A-all fast!’ and there was no secrecy or whispering whatever, and one realized with a thrill how powerful Joel was. Maybe it might be silly for Joel to bellow like a bull to the men in such a small boat, but at the same time it would make the boat seem bigger, particularly if one did not look over one’s shoulder. However, it might wake the baby. He lay for the moment on the brown shawl beside her while Joel scratched in the log; he was like a chicken ready to roast, with his poor fat legs cramped up. In a burst of pity for his discomfort Caroline bent over and straightened his legs, but as soon as she removed her hand they doubled up again; moreover, the touch of her hand seemed to remind him of something and he began to whimper.

The days were hard to tell apart.

Again and again she roused from a heavy dream in a panic of fear that she had somehow lost Joel; frantic, she popped her head from the enshrouding shawl, opening her eyes suddenly in the light. But always he was there, an awful spectacle indeed, cheering her with a grimace of a grin. He looked the master, silent, sure; he was burned and haggard, his lips were parched, a scraggly beard flourished exceedingly upon his countenance, but his red narrowed eyes restlessly searched the horizon, watched the sail, squinted over the dazzling chart. All was yet well. Then, blinded either by the sun or by Joel’s shining presence, she slipped back into the shadows.

Nothing was continuous. She wakened — a picture flashed on the screen and was gone. Rarely she spoke.

Once she saw Joel leaning toward Mads, who held the baby on his lap and a condensed-milk can in one hand, and tried to dribble a little milky substance into the pink, yelling mouth of that wild animal, who flourished tiny hands and kicked his red legs in a temper monumental for his size. Two, or perhaps more, sailors hovered just behind her, watching.

‘He ain’t like it,’ commented Mads hoarsely. His conclusion seemed completely accurate. Joel grunted.

‘I don’t like it either,’ whispered Caroline in an effort to justify her son’s peculiarities. ‘I hate it, too.’ Several pairs of eyes turned to her, red-rimmed eyes in hairy faces.

‘It’s all there is, Caroline,’ she heard Joel reply as the picture faded away.

Another time she saw almost the same scene save that the baby was sucking voraciously on a wisp of grayish rag dabbled frequently into the glittering can.

‘I don’t believe it’s good for him,’ muttered Joel.

‘He ain’t got the teeth for hard-tack, sir,’ submitted a remote voice which resembled that of the donor of the Alaskan salmon-spear.

Again, in the passage of days, Caroline came to herself, an anxious parent, and whispered an inquiry of Joel as to whether someone had attended to her child’s diapers.

‘We got ‘em trailing on the end of a line,’ reported that reliable sea dog and, straining, she glimpsed indeed a patch of white leaping in the wavering path of the boat.

‘Salt water,’ she protested. ‘I think it will hurt his poor legs.’ But Joel patted her hand and she drifted off again to where her mother was making gingerbread in the breezy kitchen in Wiscasset.

Days and days and days. . . .

She dreamed that she was sitting on the splintery yellow kitchen floor in the bright warm oblong beside the screen door, and a big bad fly was on the outside, buzzing and buzzing, and pushing to get in — no, a hand was pressing on her shoulder and a familiar croak called to her.

‘Caroline! Caroline! An island!’ She was still in the boat. She opened her heavy eyes and blinked, but there was no island to be seen. No island. None at all. She put her head down once more, but the inexorable voice went on and on — a voice with a hint of authority.

‘Caroline! Wake up! It’s an island — for you and the baby and everybody.’ For the baby. Oh yes, for the baby. She had almost forgotten him. He had cried all day and all night and had been as bad as beans, but he was good now; he had heard about the island. ‘Where?’ she moved her stiff lips soundlessly.

‘Starboard bow,’ said Joel’s voice, quite close. Was starboard right or left? And if one looked toward the back of the boat, where was it then? She raised her head and peered at the dazzling tin-can sea with a strip of paper unrolling along it. There was no island. Joel was crazy. But he was so persistent.

‘It’s Juan Fernandez!’ His husky whisper slid away from her, but his hand was inescapably tight on her bony shoulder. ‘Robinson Crusoe’s island. Listen, dear, we can get to Valparaiso and take a steamer home to Bath.’ Robinson Crusoe was in a bright blue book with gilt letters, on the top shelf; he was the man who was cast away on a desert island with savages and goats. He tamed the goats and milked the savages — on Friday. No, he milked the savages and tamed the goats on Friday. He made him a coat of an old nanny-goat, and what do you s’pose made him do so? The baby might like goat’s milk better than condensed milk in a shiny can with a blue cow on the label, — he was so unreasonable, — but if there were milk only on Friday and he wanted milk every minute —

Joel mumbled on and on and pinched her shoulder.

‘Look forward!' He turned her reluctant chin. There it was! It was a vision of mountain tops and green trees rising from a shining sea, cool trees and bushes. Shade and a desert island — a better place for women to live in than the seclusion of an umbrella in an open boat with many men. She remembered the piece of hard-tack in her hot hand and lifted it to her lips, grinding it feebly with her teeth; it hurt her face to open her mouth even a little. For a while she stared at a delightful dark spot in a bright universe; it was at her right, a short distance off. Presently she made it out to be the umbrella, under which sat a fearful reddish giant covered with golden hair, with her own amiable little pig on his knee. A maternal jealousy stirred her.

‘I want to hold him,’ she whispered. Joel’s hand bit into her shoulder, and he did not answer.

‘He iss assleep now, ma’am,’ Mads hissed at her. ‘If I moof him, he cries, maybe.’

‘He does n’t like me!’ she lamented. ‘He’s a bad boy.’

‘Sssh, sssh!’ reproved Joel. ‘He’s been a good boy, and we are taking him to Robinson Crusoe’s island. A feller should be older when he goes to sea.’ He achieved a ragged, gasping laugh.

‘When he grows up—’ began Caroline; but she was tired of talking and forgot what she had had in mind to say.

Juan Fernandez was a pleasant place to rest. She had a canvas hammock made from the lifeboat’s sail stretched under the trees that smelled like sandalwood. She lay in the shade and was contented. The wind blew on her steadily, and the sun shone only in little patches through the leaves. The pretty sunshine. There were millions and millions of goats and quantities of strong milk and coarse meat and fish and fruit; there were a few curious people who seemed eager to get her what she wanted, though really all she wanted was to lie in the shade and watch the flowers and the birds. There were innumerable humming birds, as swift and bright as fireflies; some were bright brown with gold heads, and others, more beautiful still, were royally green, and their heads shone with a greenish-golden crown. They were prettier than any of the birds in Bath. She lay in her hammock or sat in the heavenly shade and reached out unsuccessfully to pat the swift things when they flew near.

When she came away, an old woman of the island, expecting to please, gave her the dried skins of three of those little birds. The poor dead pretties. . . .

‘You have n’t told me a thing!’ complained young Caroline. ‘Not one thing! You said there was a handkerchief in the box! Where did the birds come from? And where’s the handkerchief and Uncle Joel’s father’s watch?’

‘ He was only a little baby, you know,’ murmured old Caroline, faded eyes fixed on the past; ‘and Joel wrapped him in the handkerchief — to bury him.’

In the old parlor the curtains blew in and out, and the pattern of the many-paned windows lay bright on the heathenish carpet. Old Caroline dreamed of her wedding trip, and young Caroline beat her restless feet on a stupid rug and was fiercely discontented with the present.

‘How old were you then?’ she burst out, hoping against hope.

‘Why, I was twenty-four, I guess. No, maybe I was twenty-five,’ old Caroline replied, frowning and calculating. Young Caroline snorted bitterly.

‘I’m thirty-two! I’ve never been anywhere except to New York and Boston and Philadelphia! There are n’t any sea captains for me to marry and I ‘ll never have enough money to go anywhere — anywhere!’

‘ It is n’t anything much to go places,’said old Caroline remotely.