Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/83

Rh think that the chance is gone forever. It’s a nice end for a man who once thought the sea  was all his very own!”

“Was it hard to make up your mind to stay ashore?” asked Billy. He was watching the bank of clouds that had spread across the  western sky and praying the Captain would  keep on talking. The sun had begun to dip into the mass of heavy grey, and was sending  up long shafts of red-gold light.

“It wasn’t so bad the day the doctor told me that I could never go out of port again,”  Captain Saulsby said; “the hard life had done  for me and the sharp sea winds had bitten so  deep into my bones that I knew, long before  he said so, that my usefulness was done. No, the end really came a year before when I found, all of a sudden, that the sailor I  thought I was, the Ned Saulsby who could  face any hardship, do any duty without faltering and without tiring, that he was gone as completely as though he had died.

“It was on the schooner Mary Jameson, bound out of Portland with lumber and coal. We had had fearful weather for three days out, blowing so hard that there was no peace  or rest for any one. We were all dog-tired