1 It seems to me impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.
2 But I thought, also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.
3 "That he's going home some day to see his mother," I answered diplomatically.
4 My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know.
5 You see," he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across half the girth of the earth, "each year I was going home.
6 He had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.
7 The man who had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk.
8 I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death upon them and unwilling to die.
9 They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed of a mother and some several sisters.
10 The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
11 My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction with their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads on my den, when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.