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Updated: June 9, 2025
Then there was commotion. Nautica ran into the galley and Lady Fairweather ran for the Commodore, who was out on deck. He reached the galley to find one end of it in flames and himself half buried under a shower of boxes, cans, paper bags, and packages of breakfast food.
When the real world took shape for Gadabout that morning on the James, she was some distance above Shirley and the river was a smaller river than we had seen at any time before. By the chart, we observed that it was a comparatively narrow stream all the rest of the way to Richmond. We had now entered upon a portion of the old waterway that Nautica insisted had been done up in curl-papers.
One more locker, and, "I've found it!" triumphantly cried the Commodore; but then, in dismay, "There goes the tongue out of the thing." Suddenly came another blast from the steamer. She sounded almost atop of us, and the whistling was followed by a swashing of water as though her propeller had been reversed. "Why don't you call Henry?" asked Nautica. "No time now," said the Commodore.
And then we wondered other things about fogs and mists and bewildered ships. "If only one could see things in a fog, it wouldn't be so bad," she said conclusively. "No," came the answer dryly, "a fog that one could see in would be quite an improvement." "Wait a moment," laughed Nautica. "I mean it isn't merely the dangers lurking in a fog, but the way you go into them that is so terrible.
And when we set our faces toward Gadabout again, Nautica had roses and lavender and violets from an old garden that refused to stop blooming with the rest of the plantation, and the Commodore treasured a rare pamphlet upon early Virginia that only Virginia courtesy would have entrusted to a stranger. Through the quiet of the sleeping plantation, we took our way toward the river.
For a while there was no sound but the twitter of the birds and the murmur of the river. Then the Commodore found something in his book, and he began very solemnly to tell of how on that very spot the colonists endured the horrors of the "Starving Time." At this there was such a genuine exclamation of pleasure from Nautica that the Commodore knew he was too late; she had not even heard.
The trees were swamp cypresses that had lost their summer green, and stood drooping and forlorn in the low, marshy soil. Nautica wasted a good deal of sympathy upon them as she compared them with the richly clothed pines and the luxuriant holly upon our side of the stream.
We were all of us indeed in high spirits on the occasion; though some of us a little regretted the good things we were likely to leave behind us by the fisherman's neglect; I might give it a worse name, for he faithfully promised to execute the commission, which he had had abundant opportunity to do; but nautica fides deserves as much to be proverbial as ever Punica fides could formerly have done.
With little or nothing to account for it, except the perversity of gasoline, or perhaps the contents of the little pink box, the flames with a final flare went out. Then we took account of the situation. Flour was everywhere. Nautica had eyebrows and hair singed, though she found that out only when she got the flour off.
The Commodore quite likely did breathe audibly now and then; but Nautica was wide awake, as shown by her announcing with feeling and frequency that "she knew we were dragging anchor and were just about to be horribly wrecked upon rocks or 'stobs' or something or other." The Commodore arose and busied himself about cockpit and cabin mysteriously.
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