Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: . Light-ship 67 PERRAULT was the good old Frenchman who kept the general store just across from the Navy Yard gate, and Baldwin was the chief boson's mate, U. S. N., who commanded the Whist, the little tug which was used as a general utility boat by the Navy Yard people. Old Perrault was born in Paris, and, in God's goodness, hoped yet to die there. And Baldwin had been in Paris, more than once in his cruising youth, and could converse of Paris; and to converse of Paris, in such loving language, was it not to win one's heart ? Old Perrault had never dissembled his regard for the sailor. A pity he viewed life so carelessly, the brave-hearted Baldwin. So excellent in many respects, if he had but a little ambition for himself! If he but hearkened a little for the world's opinion. But such a man! Sometimes old Perrault wished that his motherless Claire would disregard all his wordly homilies, fall in love with the rugged Baldwin, and marry him. Baldwin himself maintained no such exalted hopes'. A fine husband he'd make after his riotous years! But he had a friend, recently detailed to the yard, and warmly recommended by the boson's mate, this friend Harty, chief wireless operator, soon came to be the most regular of all the Saturday night attendants at old Perrault's store. It was on Saturday nights that the unmarried foreman on the breakwater job came up to see old Perrault. If you stood well with the old fellow, like as not he would ask you to the house of a Sunday afternoon, and then you could sit around and rest your eyes on the lovely Claire while she played the piano. One might think that old Perrault, who so casually picked his company, was a careless sort of parent; but not so, as witness his questioning of Baldwin, when it began to dawn on him that this w...