"I'm a-goin' to settle down. Yes, sir! I got enough sea-goin'. The rheumatiz has got a grip on me anyway. And I want to stretch my old bones in a bed that ain't forever pitchin' an' tossin'. I was took with Cardhaven when I saw it years ago--when this feller was a baby," and he jerked a forefinger, as hard as a spike, into the soft muscles covering the surprised Tom's ribs. "Hoh!" ejaculated Tom. "What you doin'?" "Now, Tom," came the admonitory voice of his mother again. Then she hastened to say: "Pull right up, Uncle Jonah. Never mind your pipe, Orrin. Sit down and eat first. Pearly will finish these cakes." She sat down herself behind an enormous teapot. Orrin drank quantities of tea. It was filling, he said, and cheap. Pearl had taken the captain's hardshell hat and his cane. He smiled at her, and she dimpled in return. There was already a bond of sympathy between the two. "That there ox of Silas Peebles' we seen at the fair to-day was a master big one," observed Orrin, already gulping down with gusto the hot tea from a deep saucer. Tom's face immediately fell again on this reminder of the fair. Pearl eyed the young fellow suspiciously from her station at the stove. Something had gone all wrong with Tom on this outing. "I did admire the way your Cousin Ida was dressed, Orrin," said Sarah Petty. "That orange and blue certainly did set her off." "Huh!" returned her husband, "she looked like a lapstreak sloop goin' to a regatta. What you women see in sech folderols is beyond me. I can't make head nor tail of the fashions." "A woman, like a ship, I reckon, ought to put her best foot for'ard. I like to see 'em flyin' their pretty duds an' duffel." "I can see you 'preciate the sect," said Sarah Petty, preening. "You ain't too old, Uncle Jonah, to marry and have a home of your own again." She said it with hidden anxiety. What Orrin had suggested about the old mariner's possible wealth had begun to work like yeast in Sarah Petty's mind. "No. I guess not," Cap'n Jonah said thoughtfully. "I was married once, and she was a good woman. If there is a next world, as the preachers say there is (and they ought to know, considerin' as they're always studyin' the chart of them waters an' can box the heavenly compass so slick), why," continued the captain, "I wouldn't want to mix two women in my mind. They say heaven's a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary air at rest. But it's borne in on my mind that two good women, let alone wicked ones, could make a feller a lot of trouble, even in the heavenly pastures. I don't want to run no sech risk. I will stay single for the rest of my natural life, I guess. "Ye-as, Pearly. I don't care if I do take another heap o' them griddle cakes. They're lickin' good."