The old lobster smack's sail caught the
breeze again at this moment, and she moved off down the bay.
Turning, I found old Elijah Tilley, who had come softly out of his
dark fish-house, as if it were a burrow.
"Boy got kind o' drowsy steerin' of her; Monroe he hove him
right overboard; 'wake now fast enough," explained Mr. Tilley, and
we laughed together.
I was delighted, for my part, that the vicissitudes and
dangers of the Miranda, in a rocky channel, should have given me
this opportunity to make acquaintance with an old fisherman to whom
I had never spoken. At first he had seemed to be one of those
evasive and uncomfortable persons who are so suspicious of you that
they make you almost suspicious of yourself. Mr. Elijah Tilley
appeared to regard a stranger with scornful indifference. You
might see him standing on the pebble beach or in a fish-house
doorway, but when you came nearer he was gone. He was one of the
small company of elderly, gaunt-shaped great fisherman whom I used
to like to see leading up a deep-laden boat by the head, as if it
were a horse, from the water's edge to the steep slope of the
pebble beach.
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