“Ah-h!” The stranger drew his massive brows together ruminating for a minute, his eyes on the wavy ribbon dance. “Ah! but, maybe, the two aren’t so wide apart as you think.” He turned and nodded at her. “Take a stormy morning at sea, now. I’ve seen the dawn, the morning-glory to be, come up, just a little grey flutter in the sky—like a dove-grey chicken that the foam had hatched—the foam that was piled like a great, pale egg against the horizon! It’s a funny world, little girl,” with an all-comprehensive wink of the sea-blue eye. “Things an’ meanings of things are never such miles apart but that you can link ’em, somehow; an’ that’s true of more than foam and flower!”
Cousin Anne had risen suddenly from the bench under the catalpa tree, shocked at seeing one of the girls whom she was chaperoning holding free converse with a stranger. Now she was advancing with warmly outstretched hand.
“Why! Miss Winter, I never expected to meet you here.” The massive stranger, standing bareheaded in the sunshine, was as cordially shaking that proffered hand.
“It’s Captain Andy, my dears!” Miss Anne Winter beckoned to the two Deering girls, her relatives and special charges. “Olive! this is Captain Andrew Davis who saved your Cousin Marvin’s life, with that of several other young men—college chums—when they were wrecked, while yachting a couple of years ago, off the Newfoundland Coast. You remember?” flutteringly.
“Oh! yes, indeed.” Olive extended a gracious, girlish hand; she was conscious of a little creepy thrill at meeting a real live hero, especially one who carried the heroism done up in such massive bulk, but she had heard her Cousin Marvin—before the rescue—speak of this Captain Andy Davis as being a sea-captain in no grand, mercantile way, as commanding no big barque, but only what Marvin—likewise before the rescue—dubbed a smelly fish-kettle, otherwise a New England fishing-schooner, little over a hundred feet in length from stem to taffrail.
Heroism had its noble uses, of course, especially when one had been stranded for hours as Marvin and those other college boys were upon sharp, naked rocks, seeing their yacht broken to pieces by the mountainous swell of an old sea after a storm, death staring them in the face, with no hope of rescue, until Captain Andy and his gallant “fish-kettle” hove in sight and bore down upon them—until Captain Andy, with a volunteer from his crew, launched a dory and succeeded in saving their lives at the extreme risk of his own.