There wasn't much too him, as far as stature can prove. He wasn't tall at all, and he was quite thin. He wore very small hands and his legs were about as wide around as his arms, which were about one inch thicker than a leather belt is wide...

He had sandy colored hair that was as long as his life.. He swore to his dying mother as a boy that he would never cut his curls... By the time he was a full grown man, his curls hung long past his coat tails and he braided them into three long braids.. One that hung down his back , and two on each side..

His teeth had all been knocked out on his right side in a bar fight, by an iron stein, thrown purposefully in his direction by a very large and drunkenly angry Afrikaans man.

He smoked. He smoked in his pipe anything that could be smoked in a pipe, and he chewed tobacco too.

The teeth that he had left for teeth in his mouth were stained a goldenrod brown that told the tales of all he smoked and chewed.

While on his travels in the Muslim lands, he had been introduced to oral hygiene. He religiously brushed and chewed on a traditional Miswak/Siwak brush and later in his life, gave up the chewing tobacco for spearmint molasses chew... So he smelled nice.. By the time he met , her....

She fell in love with him for his worldliness. She loved the way he laughed, with all of his spirit, and all of his character.. She loved the way his eyes would squint, one blue and one golden green, after he first rose to wake in the mornings...

And he, fell in love with her for her effluence in the Dutch language , and her love for the orphans... He loved the way she strained her tea by mashing it down with her fingers, and how she hated figs...

They would spend hours with the orphans, she had made it her life purpose to educate them in the Dutch language, and he would teach them to wrestle. He also taught them about other things.. How to fish with a net, and how to tan leather, he would teach them about firearms and gun powder, he would tell them tales of fireworks and whale hunts...

He spent time with the orphans because he himself was an orphan, and after giving up the life always at sea, the kids kept him young..

He could not deny that the more time he spent with the orphans, the less he longed to be at sea...

And that is how he met the lovely French teacher of the Dutch language...

And,

She fell in love with him...

And he, fell madly in love with her....

He always said he would never love anything more than he loved the sea...

But his love for the orphans taught him that he could love past the sea... And when he met her, well it just all came together, and he was the happiest man that he could be..