But all this belongs to the Present, and any such prophecy uttered in the days with which our story has to do would have been regarded as the wildest of ravings. For then the whale-ship was a reality and a power, the terror of all mothers of wayward boys, and the general resort of reckless runaways and prodigals. The thought that it could ever be superseded by any undiscovered agency had not yet made its way into the heads of even the sage prognosticators who studied the prophets and the apocalypse, and were able to dispose of all the beasts and dragons, and to assign them appropriate places in the future, with the utmost certainty and satisfaction.
It is certain that no such forebodings startled the complacency of two young men who sat, in the gathering twilight of a mild spring evening, on a fragment of drift-wood in a little cove of New London harbor, with the waves sweeping up almost to their feet, and the western sky still flushed with the departing glory of sunset.
They were a stout, bronzed, muscular couple, loosely clad in the common sailor-suits of the period, and both with the shrewd, resolute cast of countenance that distinguished the irrepressible Yankee then no less than now. The darker of the two was the more attractive, for he had the jolly twinkling eye, and gayly infectious air that goes with the high animal temperament, and always carries a bracing tonic with it like the sea-breeze. Wherever John Avery came, all the evil spirits of dulness and mopes and blues, that conspire so fearfully for the misery of mankind, had to give way, and one burst of his spontaneous merriment would exorcise the whole uncanny troop. John was a born sailor, with all the dashing frankness, and generous, hearty temper characteristic of the class, and not deficient in the faculty for getting into scrapes that is also an invariable endowment of his prototypes.
The other was a less open face, sharper in its outlines, and with more angles than curves. Had it been less kindly, it might have been the face of a rascal, and yet an artist could easily have idealized it into that of a hero. For all these variations and contrasts of characteristic expression, that have such influence among us, are, after all, wonderfully slight affairs, and a few touches either way, upon the vast majority of faces, would give a seraph or a demon at the shortest notice. The bright, plump countenance of Jack was an open book, known and read of all men, while that of his cousin Philo was a study far more perplexing, and in the end less satisfactory. But the conversation of the two was sufficiently plain.
