"An' what do you think they'll say to 'ee there? Eh?"
"You can ask 'em to send us better weather." I suggested.
"Tell 'ee what I'll do," said Tommy with a prodigiously wise squint. "I'll take up a buckle-strap to thiccy ol' God, if 'er don't send better weather, an' then yu won't none on 'ee get sent to bed for wet feet!"
At a corner near here, there is a very blank cottage wall, and in the centre of it a little window. Behind the closed window, all day and every day, sits an old woman at her lace pillow. Some portraits--Rembrandt's especially--give one the impression that a shutter has suddenly been drawn aside; that behind the shutter we are allowed to watch for a moment or two a face so full of meaning as to be almost more than human. The same impression is given me by the old lace-maker in the window when I pass to and fro, and catch sight of her face so still, her hands so active, her bobbins so swift and, because of the intervening glass, so silent. How nervously the hands speed with the bobbins, how very deliberately with the pins that make the pattern! How hardly human it is!
One evening, however, the window was open, children stood round in a group, and I heard the small click of the bobbins through the still air. The children were laughing, delighted with the old woman's swiftness. She that had been a picture, was become a living being.
No doubt, she is working at her lace pillow now. She has several mouths to feed. I wonder does she earn as much as Grannie Pinn?
This long time I have wished to go congering all night, but have been unable to do so for want of a mate. It is more than one man's work to haul a boat up the beach in daytime, let alone the middle of the night or at early dawn. If the _Moondaisy_'s old crew was here....
Ah! those were days--when George and the Little Commodore and the Looby and myself used to row out with a swinging stroke at sundown to Elm-beech-tree[13] and Conger Pool. The choosing of the mark; the careful heaving of the sling-stone; the blinn, skate, pollack, spider-crabs, and conger eels, we used to catch; the fights with the conger in the dark or by the light of matches or of an old lantern that blew out when it was most wanted; the absurd way the crew turned up their noses at my nice tomato sandwiches and gobbled down stringy corned beef; their quiet slumber round the stern seats and my solitary watch amidships over all the lines, and at the sea-fire trailing in the flood-tide; their crustiness when I awoke them to shift our mark and their jubilation when a whopper was to be gaffed; the utter peacefulness of the night after they had gone to sleep again; our merry row home and hearty beaching of the boat; the cup of hot tea.... It is all clean gone. George is in the Navy and the Little Commodore is under a glass box of waxen flowers up on land. Did I bring back a catch alone, perhaps the old boat would be stove in.