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Reader, you may visit Nantucket's sea-girt isle, you may walk those peaceful shores where she loved to roam; you may meet there that lone man on the shore; you will approach him with feelings of deep regard, not unlike reverence; but do not hesitate to inquire of him for the grave of the Sea-flower.
The beaming beacon still keeps vigil over Nantucket's peaceful slumberers, while her little ones, in their gladsome dreams of childhood, wander up and down those shores, intent upon their search for the most delicate sea-mosses, exclaiming with each new found treasure, "See! I have found a gem among the sea-weeds."
Other days than those which had been spent in sweet seclusion on Nantucket's peaceful shores, now dawned upon the Sea-flower.
All along the island in the steep of the sun the air had this magnifying quality. It loomed the white headstones in the cemetery on the hill back of the town till they seemed bigger than the town itself, symbolic perhaps of how large a proportion of its former glory lies here. Nantucket's one boat out at this time of year leaves at seven in the morning.
These were more than adequate for by and by the office sent down word, "Tell Billy Clark for heaven's sake to quit sending us money: He is too far ahead of us." As might have been expected Nantucket's town crier died poor and would have been in want had not a subscription paper been started for him by the local paper.
Yet it is safe to say that no man of all the island dwellers ever did or ever will tread the stairs or look from the octagonal windows with a more intense individuality than that of Billy Clark, Nantucket's town crier, now lamentably dead since 1907. Each afternoon he climbed to the crow's nest with horn under his arm to watch for the daily incoming steamer.
And you may indeed discover in the feebleness of my unpretending pen, much that is food for critics; yet give not a thought of ridicule to Nantucket's favored ones, for it is not for me to enlist under her banner of superiority of intellect.
While they were thus ploughing their way on the mighty deep, Nantucket's famous crier, "Billy" Clark, had climbed to his position in the tower of the Unitarian church of the town, as had been his daily custom for years, spy-glass in hand, to see the steamer when she should come in sight.
It makes me half believe the humorous, oft-told tale of skipper Hackett, who knew his location by tasting the ooze on the tip of the lead. He who roared to Marden Nantucket's sunk and here we are Right over old Marm Hackett's garden. In a northwest gale the Nantucketer, though far to the southeast, should be able to locate the shoals and steer home by the smell of the wind.
In a half hour's time they had climbed the stairs to the tower, and were admiring the fine new clock, a gift from one of Nantucket's sons, now living in New York, which had been first set in motion two years before, to replace an old one which had told the time for over half a century.
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