In my school vacations I used occasionally to visit an old sailor friend, a man of uncommon natural gifts, and that varied experience of life which does so much to supply the want of other means of education.  He must have been a handsome man in his youth, and though time and hardship had done their utmost to make a ruin of his bold features, and had made it needful to braid his still jetty black locks together to cover his bald crown, his was a fine, striking head yet, to my boyish fancy.  I loved to sit at his feet, and hear him tell the events of sixty years of toil and danger, suffering and well-earned joy, as he leaned with both hands upon his stout staff, his body swaying with the earnestness of his speech.  His labors and perils were now ended, and in his age and infirmity he had found a quiet haven.  He had built a small house by the side of the home of his childhood, and his son, who followed his father’s vocation, lived under the same roof.  This son and two daughters were all that remained to him of a large family.

“An easterly bank and a westerly glim are certain signs of a wet skin!” said the fisherman, pointing to the heavy black masses of cloud that hung over the eastern horizon, one morning when I had risen at sunrise for a day’s fishing. “’T won’t do; don’t go out to-day!  There’s soon such a breeze off shore, as, with the heavy chop, would make you sick enough!  Besides, the old dory won’t put up with such a storm as is coming.  No fishing, my boy, to-day.”

His old father said, “Stephen is right.  There is a blow brewing.”  And he came to look, leaning on his cane.  “Stay in to-day.”

I yielded, and the sky during the morning slowly assumed a dull, leaden hue.  The storm came on in the afternoon, heavily pattering, and pouring, and blowing against the windows, and obscuring the little light of an autumn twilight.  I wandered through the few small rooms of the cottage, endeavoring to amuse myself, while the light lasted, with two funeral sermons and an old newspaper.  Then I sat down at a window, and I well remember the gloomy landscape, seen through the rain, in the dusk:—­the marsh, with the creek dividing it, the bare round eminence between the house and the beach, or rather the rocky cliffs, and on either side the wide, lonely sands, with heavy foam-capped breakers rolling in upon the shore, with a sound like a solemn dirge.  At a distance on the left, half hidden by the walnut-trees, lay the ruins of a mill, which had always the air of being haunted.  A high, rocky hill, very nearly perpendicular on the side next the house, was covered on the sides and top with junipers, pines, and other evergreens.  As the darkness thickened, I left the lonely “best room” for the seat in the large chimney-corner, in the kitchen.  The old wife tottered round, making preparations for the evening meal, and muttered recollections of shipwrecks which the storm brought to her mind.  Now and then she would go to a window, turn back her cap-border from her forehead, put her face close to the glass, shading off the firelight with her hand, and gaze out into the darkness.