her days as to have somebody announce, whether from actual knowledge or hearsay, that Captain Jack Prince was the best shipmaster that ever sailed out of Dunport....  She always was sure there were some presents stored away for herself and young Jack, her brother, in one of the lockers of the little cabin.  Poor Jack! how he used to frighten her by climbing the shrouds and waving his cap from almost inaccessible heights.  Poor Jack! and Miss Prince climbed the step to look down the harbor again, as if the ship were more than thirty days out from Amsterdam, and might be expected at any time if the voyage had been favorable.

The house was at no great distance from the water side, though the crowded buildings obscured the view from the lower stories.  There was nothing coming in from sea but a steam-tug, which did not harmonize with these pleasant reminiscences, though as Miss Prince raised the window a fine salt breeze entered, well warmed with the May sunshine.  It had the flavor of tar and the spirit of the high seas, and for a wonder there could be heard the knocking of shipwrights’ hammers, which in old times were never silent in the town.  As she sat there for a few minutes in the window seat, there came to her other recollections of her later girlhood, when she had stolen to this corner for the sake of being alone with her pleasant thoughts, though she had cried there many an hour after Jack’s behavior had given them the sorrow they hardly would own to each other.  She remembered hearing her father’s angry voice down stairs.  No! she would not think of that again, why should she? and she shut the window and went back to be sure that she had locked the camphor chest, and hung its key on the flat-headed rusty nail overhead.  Miss Prince heard some one open and shut the front door as she went down, and in the small front room she found Captain Walter Parish, who held a high place among her most intimate friends.  He was her cousin, and had become her general adviser and counselor.  He sometimes called himself laughingly the ship’s husband, for it was he who transacted most of Miss Prince’s important business, and selected her paint and shingles and her garden seeds beside, and made and mended her pens.  He liked to be useful and agreeable, but he had not that satisfaction in his own home, for his wife had been a most efficient person to begin with, and during his absences at sea in early life had grown entirely self-reliant.  The captain joked about it merrily, but he nevertheless liked to feel that he was still important, and Miss Prince generously told him, from time to time, that she did not know how she should get on without him, and considerately kept up the fiction of not wishing to take up his time when he must be busy with his own affairs.

“How are you this fine morning, Cousin Nancy?” said the captain gallantly.  “I called to say that Jerry Martin will be here to-morrow without fail.  It seems he thought you would send him word when you wanted him next, and he has been working for himself.  I don’t think the garden will suffer, we have had so much cold weather.  And here is a letter I took from the office.”  He handed it to Miss Prince with a questioning look; he knew the handwriting of her few correspondents almost as well as she, and this was a stranger’s.