"So it's John come kiss me now,
John come kiss me now,
John come kiss me by and by,
And mak na mair adow."
"There's a godly one for ye," he sneered. Hereafter this became his favorite song indoors, and he sang it in the black joy of his heart.
But this was not so bad as his long evenings of drunken gloom, when he sat there with a hopeless face, silent, or growling from under his white mustache, "Here we are on a lee shore an' the riggin' rotten!" Then it seemed as if Marden were sitting by lamplight in a house of ghosts. The loss of sleep and the constant watching had worn him thin, febrile, and morbid. Often, now, the old captain was there bodily before his eyes; behind him, in the room with the closed door, his mother sat trembling with fear, as he remembered her in his boyhood. It was no fancy, but reality. Through all that hideous time he felt his mother's actual presence in the house, a comfort and a strength. Yet the long winter of spectral evenings told on him. By
