University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

Now, I cannot think of anything more unlikely and uninteresting
to make a story of than that old brown “linter”
house of Captain Zephaniah Pennel, down on the south
end of Orr's Island.

Zephaniah and Mary Pennel, like Zacharias and Elizabeth,
are a pair of worthy, God-fearing people, walking in
all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless;
but that is no great recommendation to a world gaping for
sensation and calling for something stimulating. This worthy
couple never read anything but the Bible, the Missionary
Herald, and the Christian Mirror, — never went anywhere
except in the round of daily business. He owned a fishing-smack,
in which he labored after the apostolic fashion; and
she washed, and ironed, and scrubbed, and brewed, and baked,
in her contented round, week in and out. The only recreation
they ever enjoyed was the going once a week, in good
weather, to a prayer-meeting in a little old brown schoolhouse,
about a mile from their dwelling; and making a
weekly excursion every Sunday, in their fishing craft, to
the church opposite, on Harpswell Neck.

To be sure, Zephaniah had read many wide leaves
of God's great book of Nature, for, like most Maine
sea-captains, he had been wherever ship can go, — to all
usual and unusual ports. His hard, shrewd, weather-beaten
visage had been seen looking over the railings of his brig
in the port of Genoa, swept round by its splendid crescent of

palaces and its snow-crested Apennines. It had looked out
in the Lagoons of Venice at that wavy floor which in evening
seems a sea of glass mingled with fire, and out of which rise
temples, and palaces, and churches, and distant silvery Alps,
like so many fabrics of dream-land. He had been through
the Skagerrack and Cattegat, — into the Baltic, and away
round to Archangel, and there chewed a bit of chip, and
considered and calculated what bargains it was best to make.
He had walked the streets of Calcutta in his shirt-sleeves,
with his best Sunday vest, backed with black glazed cambric,
which six months before came from the hands of Miss Roxy,
and was pronounced by her to be as good as any tailor
could make; and in all these places he was just Zephaniah
Pennel, — a chip of old Maine, — thrifty, careful, shrewd,
honest, God-fearing, and carrying an instinctive knowledge
of men and things under a face of rustic simplicity.

It was once, returning from one of his voyages, that he
found his wife with a black-eyed, curly-headed little creature,
who called him papa, and climbed on his knee, nestled under
his coat, rifled his pockets, and woke him every morning by
pulling open his eyes with little fingers, and jabbering unintelligible
dialects in his ears.

“We will call this child Naomi, wife,” he said, after consulting
his old Bible; “for that means pleasant, and I 'm
sure I never see anything beat her for pleasantness. I
never knew as children was so engagin'!”

It was to be remarked that Zephaniah after this made
shorter and shorter voyages, being somehow conscious of a
string around his heart which pulled him harder and harder,
till one Sunday, when the little Naomi was five years old,
he said to his wife, —

“I hope I a'n't a-pervertin' Scriptur' nor nuthin', but I

can't help thinkin' of one passage, `The kingdom of heaven
is like a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, and when he
hath found one pearl of great price, for joy thereof he goeth
and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that pearl.' Well,
Mary, I 've been and sold my brig last week,” he said, folding
his daughter's little quiet head under his coat, “'cause
it seems to me the Lord 's given us this pearl of great price,
and it 's enough for us. I don't want to be rambling round
the world after riches. We 'll have a little farm down on
Orr's Island, and I 'll have a little fishing-smack, and we'll
live and be happy together.”

And so Mary, who in those days was a pretty young
married woman, felt herself rich and happy, — no duchess
richer or happier. The two contentedly delved and toiled,
and the little Naomi was their princess. The wise men of
the East at the feet of an infant, offering gifts, gold, frankincense,
and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes on in
every house where there is a young child. All the hard
and the harsh, and the common and the disagreeable, is
for the parents, — all the bright and beautiful for their
child.

When the fishing-smack went to Portland to sell mackerel,
there came home in Zephaniah's fishy coat-pocket
strings of coral beads, tiny gaiter boots, brilliant silks
and ribbons for the little fairy princess, — his Pearl of
the Island; and sometimes, when a stray party from the
neighboring town of Brunswick came down to explore
the romantic scenery of the solitary island, they would be
startled by the apparition of this still, graceful, dark-eyed
child, exquisitely dressed in the best and brightest that the
shops of a neighboring city could afford, — sitting like some
tropical bird on a lonely rock, where the sea came dashing

up into the edges of arbor vitæ, or tripping along the wet
sands for shells and sea-weed.

Many children would have been spoiled by such unlimited
indulgence; but there are natures sent down into this harsh
world so timorous, and sensitive, and helpless in themselves,
that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed
for their development, — like plants which the warmest shelf
of the green-house and the most careful watch of the gardener
alone can bring into flower.

The pale child, with her large, lustrous, dark eyes, and
sensitive organization, was nursed and brooded into a beautiful
womanhood, and then found a protector in a high-spirited,
manly young ship-master, and she became his wife.

And now we see in the best room — the walls lined with
serious faces — men, women, and children, that have come
to pay the last tribute of sympathy to the living and the
dead.

The house looked so utterly alone and solitary in that
wild, sea-girt island, that one would have as soon expected
the sea-waves to rise and walk in, as so many neighbors; but
they had come from neighboring points, crossing the glassy
sea in their little crafts, whose white sails looked like millers'
wings, or walking miles from distant parts of the island.

Some writer calls a funeral one of the amusements of a
New England population. Must we call it an amusement
to go and see the acted despair of Medea? or the dying
agonies of poor Adrienne Lecouvreur? It is something of
the same awful interest in life's tragedy, which makes an
untaught and primitive people gather to a funeral, — a
tragedy where there is no acting, — and one which each
one feels must come at some time to his own dwelling.

Be that as it may, here was a roomful. Not only Aunt

Roxy and Aunt Ruey, who by a prescriptive right presided
over all the births, deaths, and marriages of the neighborhood,
but there was Captain Kittridge, a long, dry, weather-beaten
old sea-captain, who sat as if tied in a double bow-knot,
with his little fussy old wife, with a great Leghorn
bonnet, and eyes like black glass beads shining through
the bows of her horn spectacles, and her hymn-book in her
hand ready to lead the psalm. There were aunts, uncles,
cousins, and brethren of the deceased; and in the midst
stood two coffins, where the two united in death lay sleeping
tenderly, as those to whom rest is good. All was still as
death, except a chance whisper from some busy neighbor, or
a creak of an old lady's great black fan, or the fizz of a fly
down the window-pane, and then a stifled sound of deep-drawn
breath and weeping from under a cloud of heavy
black crape veils, that were together in the group which
country-people call the mourners.

A gleam of autumn sunlight streamed through the white
curtains, and fell on a silver baptismal vase that stood on
the mother's coffin, as the minister rose and said, “The
ordinance of baptism will now be administered.” A few
moments more, and on a baby brow had fallen a few drops
of water, and the little pilgrim of a new life had been called
Mara in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, —
the minister slowly repeating thereafter those beautiful words
of Holy Writ, “A father of the fatherless is God in his holy
habitation,” — as if the baptism of that bereaved one had
been a solemn adoption into the infinite heart of the
Lord.

With something of the quaint pathos which distinguishes
the primitive and Biblical people of that lonely shore, the
minister read the passage in Ruth from which the name of

the little stranger was drawn, and which describes the return
of the bereaved Naomi to her native land. His voice trembled,
and there were tears in many eyes as he read, “And
it came to pass as she came to Bethlehem, all the city was
moved about them; and they said, Is this Naomi? And
she said unto them, Call me not Naomi; call me Mara; for
the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out
full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why
then call ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against
me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?”

Deep, heavy sobs from the mourners were for a few moments
the only answer to these sad words, till the minister
raised the old funeral psalm of New England, —

The words rose in old “China,” — that strange, wild
warble, whose quaintly blended harmonies might have been
learned of moaning seas or wailing winds, so strange and
grand they rose, full of that intense pathos which rises over
every defect of execution; and as they sung, Zephaniah
Pennel straightened his tall form, before bowed on his hands,
and looked heavenward, his cheeks wet with tears, but something
sublime and immortal shining upward through his blue
eyes; and at the last verse he came forward involuntarily,
and stood by his dead, and his voice rose over all the others
as he sung, —

The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver
hair, and they that looked beheld his face as it were the face
of an angel; he had gotten a sight of the city whose foundation
is jasper, and whose every gate is a separate pearl.