That night at supper, with much hemming and hawing, he broached his project to my aunt. You should have heard her laugh! 'twas plain she did not believe him to be serious; she said it was all gammon, and she wondered what next indeed. But when he assured her that he meant every word of it, she was first alarmed and then angry. She talked about a maggot in his head, and asked what she was to do, a widow and not a widow, with two growing boys that would run wild without their father; and she wondered how a respectable man nigh fifty years old should think of such a thing, and there wasn't a woman in the country who would put up with such a pack of nonsense. To which he replied that Captain Cook was a respectable man with a wife and family, and if the captain's lady could part with her husband for a year or two, for the honour and profit of England, surely 'twas not becoming in Mrs. Stephen Brent to make an outcry over such a trifling matter. This made my aunt only the more angry, and, for the first time in all my knowledge of them, the good people looked unkindly upon each other. That my uncle's mind was firmly made up was plain to us next day. Bidding me say nought of his intentions, which he wished to be kept secret, lest they came to the ears of the French, he set off for London, and was absent for a matter of ten days, much to the displeasure of Nick Wabberley and Joshua Chick, who came to the house evening after evening and went very disconsolate away, my aunt detesting them both, and refusing to feed the men to whom she attributed this mad whimsy of her husband. Her anger somewhat moderated while he was away, and after a week or so she could smile at his rubbish, declaring to me that she was sure he would think better of it: he would be like a fish out of water in London Town, and the sensible folks there would laugh him out of his foolishness, that they would. She smiled and tossed her head even when he came back and told us with great heartiness that he had bought a vessel--a north-country collier of near four hundred tons, stout in her timbers and broad in the beam, built for strength rather than speed--just such a vessel as Captain Cook had sailed in. "Go along with you, Steve," she said. "Don't tell me! You'll never go rampaging over the seas--a man of your age: and 'tis a mercy, I'm sure, that you're a warm man and won't ruin yourself, for you won't get half what you gave for it when you sell your precious vessel again." She told me privately that she was sure, when the time came, the foolish man would never venture himself on a ship; what would _he_ do on a ship, she'd like to know, when he couldn't ride a dozen miles in a coach, as he had told us, without becoming squeamish and feeling as if his inside didn't belong to him! The news that he had engaged a captain--a seasoned skipper, by name Ezekiel Corke--only made her lift her hands and cry out, "Well, did you