Our river is small—so small that we build our vessels parallel to its channel and slide them in sideways. Yet it’s large enough to accommodate a brig of two hundred tons, which is as big as a man needs, no matter to what part of the world he wishes to sail. I can stand on one bank and shoot a duck as she rises from under the opposite bank; and in the spring of the year, after the salmon have stopped running, I can cast a line entirely across the stream, as the tide turns upward, and take sea-run trout from their feeding-places under the edge of the foam that comes slipping along the shore, fresh from the ocean; so, in more ways than one, the very smallness of our river is an advantage.

Our house is large, as are the houses of most Maine shipbuilders. Upstairs and down the rooms are plastered; and painted on the plaster are imaginary scenes, done by one of the Germans who travel periodically through our section, coming from the German settlements on the Kennebec—scenes showing merchant brigs breaking bulk in the lee of ruined castles, and scantily clad people performing on musical instruments in the front yards of Greek temples. Over the mantels in the dining-room and the front room is woodwork carved with jackknives by two of the best workers in our shipyard; while over the dining-room mantel is a painting of my mother, done the year after she and my father were married, by John Smybert—excellently done, too, although my mother thinks there is something wrong with the mouth.

We have nothing so elegant as Benjamin Pickman’s Salem house, which has a codfish carved on every stair-rise in the front hall; but our silver is good, part of it made by Paul Revere, and our feather beds can’t be beat anywhere, unless there’s some place where goose feathers are softer than in Arundel.

Under the house is a dry cellar, stored with crocks of mince meat made from properly cooked bear and venison haunches—which is to say scarcely cooked at all—mixed with French brandy and chopped apples from the tree that shades our kitchen windows: also smoked goose breasts, hams, smoked eels, dried apples, dried corn, salted codfish, pickled tinker mackerel, bags of onions and potatoes, racks of squashes, jars of brandied peaches, barrels of corned beef, cucumbers in brine, tubs of pigeon, plover and partridge breasts packed in melted fat, so they can be eaten when fresh meat is scarce in the winter.

… It was my middle sister Jane who saw us first; and she screamed fit to wake the dead. It brought my mother from the kitchen, my father up from the shipyard, and Judith and Susanah down from the bedrooms. There was warmth in their welcome, and more; but there was a cautiousness about them that was strange to me.