“No, deacon, it is not quite as bad as that,” resumed Roswell.  “We have brought home a good lot of skins; enough to pay the people full wages and to return you every cent of outfit, with a handsome advance on the venture.  A sealer usually makes a good business of it, if she falls in with seals.  Our cargo, in skins, can’t be worth less than $20,000; besides half a freight left on the island, for which another craft may be sent.”

“That is suthin’, the Lord be praised!” ejaculated the deacon.  “Though the schooner is as bad as gone, and the outlays have been awfully heavy, I’m almost afraid to go any further.  Gardner,—­did you—­I grow weak very fast—­did you stop—­Mary, I wish you would put the question.”

“I am afraid that my uncle means to ask if you stopped at the Key, in the West Indies, according to your instructions, Roswell?” the niece said, and most reluctantly, for she plainly saw it was fully time her uncle ceased to think of the things of this life, and to begin to turn all his thoughts on the blessed mediation, and another state of being.

“I forgot no part of your orders, sir,” rejoined Roswell.  “It was my duty to obey them, and I believe I have done so to the letter—­”

“Stop, Gar’ner,” interrupted the dying man—­“one question, while I think of it.  Will the Vineyard men have any claim of salvage on account of them skins?”

“Certainly not, sir.  These skins are all our own—­were taken, cured, stowed, and brought home altogether by ourselves.  There is a lot of skins belonging to the Vineyarders, stowed away in the house, which is yours, deacon, and which it would well pay any small craft to go and bring away.  If anybody is to claim salvage, it will be ourselves.  No salvage was demanded for the loss off Cape Henlopen, I trust?”

“No, none—­Daggett behaved what I call liberal in that affair,”—­half the critics of the day would use the adjective instead of the adverb here, and why should Deacon Prates English be any better than his neighbours?—­“and so I’ve admitted to his friends over on the Vineyard.  But, Gar’ner, our great affair still remains to be accounted for.  Do you wish to have the room cleared before you speak of that—­shall we turn the key on all these folks, and then settle accounts—­he! he! he!”

The deacon’s facetiousness sounded strangely out of place to Roswell; still, he did not exactly know how to gainsay his wishes.  There might be an indiscretion in pursuing his narrative before so many witnesses, and the young man paused until the room was cleared, leaving no one in it but the sick man, Mary, himself, and the nurse.  The last could not well be gotten rid of on Oyster Pond, where her office gave her an assumed right to know all family secrets; or, what was the same thing to her, to fancy that she knew them.  Among all the sayings which the experience of mankind has reduced to axioms, there is not one more just than that which says, “There