Least of all, perhaps, her present owner and possessor, Mr. Abner Nott.
For by the irony of circumstances, Mr. Nott was a Far Western farmer
who had never seen a ship before, nor a larger stream of water than a
tributary of the Missouri River. In a spirit, half of fascination, half
of speculation, he had bought her at the time of her abandonment, and
had since mortgaged his ranch at Petaluma with his live stock, to
defray the expenses of filling in the land where she stood, and the
improvements of the vicinity. He had transferred his household goods
and his only daughter to her cabin, and had divided the space "between
decks" and her hold into lodging-rooms, and lofts for the storage of
goods. It could hardly be said that the investment had been profitable.
His tenants vaguely recognized that his occupancy was a sentimental
rather than a commercial speculation, and often generously lent
themselves to the illusion by not paying their rent. Others treated
their own tenancy as a joke,--a quaint recreation born of the childlike
familiarity of frontier intercourse.
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