"When next I saw Dan," resumed Ferris, "he'd got married to a Boston girl and had a shore job--piano-moving--'just enough exercise to keep him soopled up,' he said. And there he was, in grand condition, sitting on the back porch and looking out on his possessions. A little white house with a porch in front and behind. And there was a garden with a little patch of cabbages, and a little patch of tomatoes, and a little patch of corn--a little patch of this and a little patch of that, not one blessed patch in the whole place as big as the bottom of a dory. And there was a school of white rabbits running around--for the children; and a fleet of pigeons sailing overhead--for the children. And the children like a fleet of little dories in the wake of Dan, and his wife washing the dishes and peeking out the kitchen window with an eye to 'em all. This was after supper one Sunday evening. And Dan would hoist up first one kid and then another, and with his pipe he'd blow rings for 'em. "And he sat there and kept advising me to marry and settle down. I stood it for a while, and then I said: 'Dan, you remember that Fourth o' July you beat up the seven policemen in Saint Johns?' I thought he'd shake his head off at me and go blind with winking and ducking his ear toward the kitchen window. 'And that night in Soorey?' I goes on, and he looked scared, and 'Sh-h!' he says, and I stopped. But later, meaning only to make conversation, I says: 'Did ever you think o' going to sea again, Dan?' And at that--I thought she was up-stairs with the children, but she wasn't--out she bounces with my hat--a spunky little woman, no higher than a buoy keg--and says: 'I don't want to hurry you, an old friend of my husband's as you are, but the last car for the city passes by the corner in five minutes. If you hurry, you can get it.' And I took that car, only it didn't pass for thirty-five minutes, and it rained most of the time I was waiting, and I didn't have any coat." Jack stood up and set his coffee-mug back in the grub locker and made as if to climb the companionway; but before he could escape Professor pinned him with: "Do you or don't you approve of his marriage?" "Wow! I set out to tell a story to please Tom here, and the first thing in telling a story is to tell it, not to stop to preach a sermon. And to finish the story, I tell you, boy"--Jack turned and fixed Fortune Bay with a solemn eye--"I tell you they'll get you--sure's wind follows an oily sea the women will get you on your weak side, if you don't watch out." "But you hear me, too, boy," put in Tom, "if it'd been Dan Magee with a few boxin' lessons out to Reno--Dan Magee afore he was married--you bet there'd been no fresh guys in Chinese trousers leanin' over the hurricane-deck of any forty-thousand-ton steamer an' yellin' JOHNSON! JOHNSON! JOHNSON! to no lone trawler on th' Grand Banks at four o'clock in the mornin'."