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WAITING FOR THE SHIP.
A FORT POINT IDYL.
About an hour's ride from the Plaza there is a
high bluff with the ocean breaking uninterruptedly
along its rocky beach. There are several cottages on
the sands, which look as if they had recently been
cast up by a heavy sea. The cultivated patch behind
each tenement is fenced in by bamboos, broken
spars and drift-wood. With its few green cabbages
and turnip-tops, each garden looks something like an
aquarium with the water turned off. In fact you
would not be surprised to meet a merman digging
among the potatoes, or a mermaid milking a sea cow
hard by.
Near this place formerly arose a great semaphoric
telegraph with its gaunt arms tossed up against the
horizon. It has been replaced by an observatory,
connected with an electric nerve to the heart of the
great commercial city. From this point the incoming
ships are signaled, and again checked off at the
the expected steamer, let me tell you a story.
Not long ago, a simple, hard-working mechanic,
had amassed sufficient by diligent labor in the mines
to send home for his wife and two children. He arrived
in San Francisco a month before the time the
ship was due, for he was a western man and had
made the overland journey and knew little of ships
or seas or gales. He procured work in the city, but
as the time approached he would go to the shipping
office regularly every day. The month passed, but
the ship came not; then a month and a week, two
weeks, three weeks, two months, and then a year.
The rough, patient face, with soft lines overlying
its hard features, which had become a daily apparition
at the shipping agent's, then disappeared. It
turned up one afternoon at the observatory as the
setting sun relieved the operator from his duties.
There was something so childlike and simple in the
few questions asked by this stranger, touching his
business, that the operator spent some time to explain.
When the mystery of signals and telegraphs
was unfolded, the stranger had one more question to
ask. “How long might a vessel be absent before
they would give up expecting her?” The operator
couldn't tell; it would depend on circumstances.
Would it be a year? Yes, it might be a year, and
vessels had been given up for lost after two years
and had come home. The stranger put his rough
hand on the operator's, and thanked him for his
“troubil” and went away.
Still the ship came not. Stately clippers swept
into the Gate, and merchantmen went by with colors
flying, and the welcoming gun of the steamer often
reverberated among the hills. Then the patient
face, with the old resigned expression, but a brighter,
wistful look in the eye, was regularly met on the
crowded decks of the steamer as she disembarked her
living freight. He may have had a dimly-defined
hope that the missing ones might yet come this way,
as only another road over that strange unknown expanse.
But he talked with ship captains and sailors,
and even this last hope seemed to fail. When the
careworn face and bright eyes were presented again
at the observatory, the operator, busily engaged,
could not spare time to answer foolish interrogatories,
so he went away. But as night fell, he was seen sitting
on the rocks with his face turned seaward, and
was seated there all that night.
When he became hopelessly insane, for that was
what the physicians said made his eyes so bright,
and wistful, he was cared for by a fellow-craftsman
who had known his troubles. He was allowed to
indulge his fancy of going out to watch for the ship,
in which she “and the children” were, at night
when no one else was watching. He had made up
his mind that the ship would come in at night. This,
and the idea that he would relieve the operator, who
would be tired with watching all day, seemed to
please him. So he went out and relieved the operator
every night!
For two years the ships came and went. He was
on her return. He was known only by a few who
frequented the place. When he was missed at last
from his accustomed spot, a day or two elapsed before
any alarm was felt. One Sunday, a party of
pleasure-seekers clambering over the rocks were attracted
by the barking of a dog that had run on before
them. When they came up they found a plainly
dressed man lying there dead. There were a few
papers in his pocket—chiefly slips cut from different
journals of old marine memoranda—and his face was
turned towards the distant sea.
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