For Florence Fenacre was the acknowledged
beauty of the town, with a dozen eligible men at her feet, and was
more courted and sought after than any girl in the place. The
place, to give it its name, was Bridgeport, one of those dead-
alive little ports on the Atlantic seaboard, with a dozen
factories and some decaying wharves and that tranquil air of
having had a past.
The widow and her pretty daughter lived in a low-roofed, red-brick
house that faced the street and sheltered a long deep shady garden
in the rear. Land and house had been bought with whale oil. Their
little income, derived from the rent of three barren and stony
farms and amounting to not more than sixty dollars a month,
represented a capitalisation of whale oil. Even the old grey
church whither they went twice of a Sunday, was whale oil too, and
had been built in bygone days by the sturdy captains who now lay
all around it under slabs of stone. There amongst them was
Florence's father and her grandfather and her great-grandfather,
together with the Macys and the Coffins and the Cabotts with whom
they had sailed and quarrelled and loved and intermarried in the
years now gone. The wide world had not been too wide for them to
sail it round and reap the harvests of far-off seas; but in death
they lay side by side, their voyages done, their bones mingling in
the New England earth.
Frank Rignold too was a son of Bridgeport, and the sea which ran
in that blood for generations bade him in manhood to rise and
follow it.
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