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“Now you both know, being housekeepers, that if you take a needle and drive it into a hunk of ice you can split it. The captain had a sail-needle with him, and so he drove it into the iceberg right alongside of the shark and split it. Now the minute he did it he knew that the man was right when he said he saw the shark wink, for it flopped out of that iceberg quicker nor a flash of lightning.”

“What a happy fish he must have been!” ejaculated Dorcas, forgetful of precedent, so great was her emotion.

“Yes,” said Captain Jenkinson, “it was a happy fish enough, but it wasn’t a happy captain. You see, that shark hadn’t had anything to eat, perhaps for a thousand years, until the captain came along with his sail-needle.”

“Surely you sailormen do see strange things,” now said the widow, “and the strangest thing about them is that they are true.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Dorcas, “that is the most wonderful thing.”

“You wouldn’t suppose,” said the Widow Ducket, glancing from one bench of mariners to the other, “that I have a sea-story to tell, but I have, and if you like I will tell it to you.”

Captain Bird looked up a little surprised.

“We would like to hear it–indeed, we would, madam,” said he.

“Ay, ay!” said Captain Burress, and the two other mariners nodded.

“It was a good while ago,” she said, “when I was living on the shore near the head of the bay, that my husband was away and I was left alone in the house. One mornin’ my sister-in-law, who lived on the other side of the bay, sent me word by a boy on a horse that she hadn’t any oil in the house to fill the lamp that she always put in the window to light her husband home, who was a fisherman, and if I would send her some by the boy she would pay me back as soon as they bought oil. The boy said he would stop on his way home and take the oil to her, but he never did stop, or perhaps he never went back, and about five o’clock I began to get dreadfully worried, for I knew if that lamp wasn’t in my sister-in-law’s window by dark she might be
a widow before midnight. So I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get that oil to her, no matter what happens or how it’s done.’Of course I couldn’t tell what might happen, but there was only one way it could be done, and that was for me to get into the boat that was tied to the post down by the water, and take it to her, for it was too far for me to walk around by the head of the bay. Now, the trouble was, I didn’t know no more about a boat and the managin’ of it than any one of you sailormen knows about clear starchin’. But there wasn’t no use of thinkin’ what I knew and what I didn’t know, for I had to take it to her, and there was no way of doin’ it except in that boat. So I filled a gallon can, for I thought I might as well take enough while I was about it, and I went down to the water and I unhitched that boat and I put the oil-can into her, and then I got in, and off I started, and when I was about a quarter of a mile from the shore–“

“Madam,” interrupted Captain Bird, “did you row or–or was there a sail to the boat?”