Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/256

308 and sailed the main—a dapper, happy, bewhiskered, tiny Frenchman. When he retired to sun himself on the cottage steps above the harbour, his wife used to sit inside the door "hooking" her wool rugs or mending his clothes, and he was content. For fifty years they had lived in the little cottage, neat as a light-house and gay with Paddy's presence. The wife fell ill—the rugs were folded away, the distaff hung in the attic. The belle-fille came to keep the house Paddy, though eighty-two, grew restless; his anchor-chain had parted—he was desolé for his first love—the sea. There was a young skipper in need of a deck-boy to watch aboard the banker when the crew went to their trawls. It was the little captain who secured the berth to the distress of his family and his priest. He laughs and rubs his shiny palms as he relates the incidents of that season off the Magdalens, which would have failed but for his knowledge of the best shallows, and would, we wager, have been a drab journey enough but for the jigs of the deck-boy and his blue-eyed cheer. He demonstrates on a homespun rug the steps he used to do in the cabin, just to prove "that his legs were still good" and his heart merry as a dance tune. Alors, when the schooner makes harbour again it was the priest who met him in the road. "Patrice! I thought to see you buried on the banks—never again among us in Arichat." "Monsieur," replied the returned one, "you are