Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/940

872 cabulary, and he was nearly out of breath as well.

"Then perhaps you will have the kindness to listen to me," continued Hiram, putting thumbs and forefingers together and adopting a calmly judicial tone. "I shall not undertake to point out to you the distinctions which lie between a gentleman and a loafer. You know them quite as well as I. To which class I belong I will leave to your more sober and, I am sure, your well-balanced judgment.

"You have, as I take it, retired permanently from a seafaring life. You intend to settle down here in Cedarton. That is natural. Also it is the wise thing to do. This is a beautiful little town. The climate is all that could be desired. Here are your boyhood friends, your dearest relatives. In spite of all your hasty words, which I overlook entirely, I want to extend to you a fraternal welcome on my own part, and a sisterly greeting from Hannah as well. You are my only brother. Possibly you have trifling faults,—and who has not?—but I am sure that you have many good points. You are a Doolittle. It follows, you see. You have been a wanderer, but through it all you have remained a Doolittle. I remember hearing father say, when you wrote back from some foreign port—was it Hongkong or Bombay?—that you had become a sailor, 'Well, I'll wager he makes a good one.

"Did father say that?" demanded Ethan.

"He did. And I have since learned that he was right. Captain James Bickell, with whom you sailed some years ago, once told me that you were the best sailor he ever shipped."

"What! Old Bickell said that?"

"Yes; and it gave me a thrill of pride, Ethan, to hear him speak of you like that. Hannah, too, felt the same. So we are glad to welcome you back and to our humble little home. We want you to live here with us, to make one of a reunited family. As you are a man accustomed to action and of an industrious nature, one to whom some sort of exercise is a necessity, I have no doubt that we can find for you some suitable employment close at hand. Tomorrow we will look about and see what can be done."

Well, that was exactly what happened. For a time Ethan seemed rather dazed, perhaps because of the abrupt change in his mode of life. He regarded his younger brother almost with awe, but he followed his suggestions with as much alacrity as though they had been the shouted orders of a first mate. In less than forty-eight hours after his return to Cedarton he found himself at work in a sail-loft, where his skill with a sailor's palm and three-sided needle brought to the Doolittle exchequer a wage almost double that which Hannah could earn at her wash-tub. Thereafter the sail-loft was added to the list of places which Hiram frequented on his daily rounds.

"It is wonderful, Ethan," he would observe, "how the muscles of the human hand can be trained to do such apparently difficult tasks without the constant direction of the mind. Now, those stitches which you are taking on that bolt-rope are as accurate and as even as if done by a machine, yet you hardly seem to give the work a thought."

"It comes just as easy as chewin' terbaccer," Ethan would modestly assert, a grin of obvious pleasure lighting his bronzed features.

"It's remarkable, though—remarkable," Hiram would insist, and then depart for some other post of observation.

For, although himself an abstainer, Hiram did not avoid the haunts of toil. In fact, he took a deep interest in labor of any sort. He would sit for hours at a time in the shops where boats were being built, watching the workmen fashion the oak ribs, fasten them with stout copper bolts to the keel, and rivet the sheathing-planks into place. Masons slowly placing brick on brick, farmers loading bags of grain into their wagons, painters swinging from eaves and plying their brushes in mid-air, all had for Hiram a gentle fascination which held his gaze and attention. Almost anywhere that things were being built or altered you might be sure of finding Hiram, perched comfortably, his back against something firm, his long legs dangling luxuriously.

Yet he was no common idler. There were plenty of those in Cedarton. Between them and Hiram Doolittle was a wide difference which they recognized, and on which, if necessary, he would