FullReads

“If I talk too much you must jest check me,” he said seriously, but with a twinkle in his eyes. “When I do get a chance to talk to anyone I’m apt to run on terrible.”

He had been a sailor from the time he was ten years old, and some of his adventures had such a marvellous edge that I secretly wondered if Uncle Jesse were not drawing a rather long bow at our credulous expense. But in this, as I found later, I did him injustice. His tales were all literally true, and Uncle Jesse had the gift of the born story-teller, whereby “unhappy, far-off things” can be brought vividly before the hearer and made to live again in all their pristine poignancy.

Mother and I laughed and shivered over Uncle Jesse’s tales, and once we found ourselves crying. Uncle Jesse surveyed our tears with pleasure shining out through his face like an illuminating lamp.

“I like to make folks cry that way,” he remarked. “It’s a compliment. But I can’t do justice to the things I’ve seen and helped do. I’ve got ’em all jotted down in my life-book but I haven’t got the knack of writing them out properly. If I had, I could make a great book, if I had the knack of hitting on just the right words and stringing everything together proper on paper. But I can’t. It’s in this poor human critter,” Uncle Jesse patted his breast sorrowfully, “but he can’t get it out.”

When Uncle Jesse went home that evening Mother asked him to come often to see us.

“I wonder if you’d give that invitation if you knew how likely I’d be to accept it,” he remarked whimsically.

“Which is another way of saying you wonder if I meant it,” smiled Mother. “I do, most heartily and sincerely.”

“Then I’ll come. You’ll likely be pestered with me at any hour. And I’d be proud to have you drop over to visit me now and then too. I live on that point yander. Neither me nor my house is worth coming to see. It’s only got one room and a loft and a stovepipe sticking out of the roof for a chimney. But I’ve got a few little things lying around that I picked up in the queer corners I used to be poking my nose into. Mebbe they’d interest you.”

Uncle Jesse’s “few little things” turned out to be the most interesting collection of curios I had ever seen. His one neat little living room was full of them–beautiful, hideous or quaint as the case might be, and almost all having some weird or exciting story attached.

Mother and I had a beautiful summer at Golden Gate. We lived the life of two children with Uncle Jesse as a playmate. Our housekeeping was of the simplest description and we spent our hours rambling along the shores, reading on the rocks or sailing over the harbour in Uncle Jesse’s trim little boat. Every day we loved the simple-souled, true, manly old sailor more and more. He was as refreshing as a sea breeze, as interesting as some ancient chronicle. We never tired of listening to his stories, and his quaint remarks and comments were a continual delight to us. Uncle Jesse was one of those interesting and rare people who, in the picturesque phraseology of the shore folks, “never speak but they say something.” The milk of human kindness and the wisdom of the serpent were mingled in Uncle Jesse’s composition in delightful proportions.

One day he was absent all day and returned at nightfall.

“Took a tramp back yander.” “Back yander” with Uncle Jesse might mean the station hamlet or the city a hundred miles away or any place between–“to carry Mr. Kimball a mess of trout. He likes one occasional and it’s all I can do for a kindness he did me once. I stayed all day to talk to him. He likes to talk to me, though he’s an eddicated man, because he’s one of the folks that’s got to talk or they’re miserable, and he finds listeners scarce ’round here. The folks fight shy of him because they think he’s an infidel. He ain’t that far gone exactly–few men is, I reckon–but he’s what you might call a heretic. Heretics are wicked but they’re mighty interesting. It’s just that they’ve got sorter lost looking for God, being under the impression that He’s hard to find–which He ain’t, never. Most of ’em blunder to Him after a while I guess. I don’t think listening to Mr. Kimball’s arguments is likely to do me much harm. Mind you, I believe what I was brought up to believe. It saves a vast of trouble–and back of it all, God is good. The trouble with Mr. Kimball is, he’s a leetle too clever. He thinks he’s bound to live up to his cleverness and that it’s smarter to thrash out some new way of getting to heaven than to go by the old track the common, ignorant folks is travelling. But he’ll get there sometime all right and then he’ll laugh at himself.”