Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 January 1889 — WHEN SILENCE FELL. [ARTICLE]

WHEN SILENCE FELL.

A Shark Story Which Tested the Patience of the Construction Lang. Philadelphia Times. -■ ■ , ——g — As it began to look like rain, the gang knocked off work and the foreman begged a pipeful of tobacco and started in yarning. “I’ve told you of the trip I made to Borneo as second mate of the Lydia Greening,” said he. “Well, perhaps I’ve told you, too, that there was the lady aboard thut trip the brig was named for—the old man’s niece, poor thing. She was a widow and had been advised to go a sea voyage to .pick up her health. But deceased/ was always on her mind. She’d slip up to the'taffrail at eight bells and stand there watching the sunset day after flay, thinking of him and twisting -her wedding ring about on her finger. The old man would nod toward her as I came up to take my trick at the wheel, and kind of chew at his goatee, and every night he said the same thing to me. ‘Gideon,’ says he, 'blum a woman aboard ship, but I’m glad for once’t I brought Sal.’ Till one evening just as the sou’easter began to freshen we heard a cry, and there was Mrs. Greening sobbing and wringing her hands about like to die. Of course, she’d dropped the ring overboard, and the time we had to get her quiet—well. She wanted us to go back and dive for it

“Well, sir the next three days our port rail was under water all the time. When she moderated we were blown clean out of reckoning. Mrs. Greening kind of crawled up on deck and watched us binding on a new fore tops’l—old one torn to lint. AU at once she called out *t therd was a shark following us. She jumped up x her face white as the canvas, and what d’you suppose that woman’s idea was? That the shark had swallowed her husband’s ring and couldn’t rest tili it was given back. “The old man looked over the rail. There was a shark, sure enough. He ran and got his harpoon; pretty harpooner, he was; nailed him first shot and we hauled him aboard. In three minutes we had him cut open, and. boys, what do you suppose we found?*’ “The ring!” shouted the gang. ; “Nothing,” said the foreman.