straight ahead as though he had not looked at the figurehead as he went by and was determined not to turn and look back at it afterward. They were past, but as they went up the hill the evening wind suddenly grew stronger and sighed through the weatherworn boards that covered the schooner’s hull, and the rattling of their loose ends was like the sound of clapping hands. What was this old boat, and why did it impress them so? And yet Ann did not feel like asking Jo about it. She wished that her father would say something to quiet this fear that had come over her so suddenly. She never before had felt anything like this strange impression that the schooner was more than just a plain ordinary boat cast up on a narrow strip of beach. 17 As though Mr. Seymour had read her mind he asked Jo, “Where did that schooner come from? She wasn’t here last summer when I was down.” 17 “No, sir.” Jo had trouble in making his stiff lips move. “She came in on a blizzard the winter past and stove up on the pond rocks.” “Whose boat was she? What is her name?” “She had no cargo on board,” said Jo slowly, as if he did not wish to say anything about it. “She had no log either. And the waves were so heavy that her name plate was gone and never came ashore.” “But wasn’t there somebody on board to tell you who she was?” “A man had no chance to live in the sea the day she came in,” explained Jo. “Four of the crew were washed ashore the next day, but they carried no papers and nobody claimed them. None of the folks wanted to bury them down in the village churchyard so pop and I put them up back of the barn where grandpop lies. It didn’t seem right not to give them a bit of ground to lie in, even though we didn’t know what brought them in here.” Mrs. Seymour exclaimed indignantly, “I never heard of anything so inhuman! Do you really mean that the people in the village refused to bury those poor shipwrecked sailors in the cemetery? Jo! Not here in a civilized land?” “You couldn’t blame the folks,” apologized Jo. 18 But evidently Mrs. Seymour was quite positive that she could, and Ann agreed with her most thoroughly. 18
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