"Well, well (just mix another afore the glass cools off), to think how the time goes. Here it are autumn ag'in, and in a few weeks 'twill be winter. It reminds me (I'll take one more, if you please, with one lump less of sugar and the space in rum) that I'm gittin' old, and I feels it. My eyes ain't so good and my legs ain't so good, and I ain't so good all over. When I goes down to the dock my lantern are heavier than it used to were, and the distance ain't so short as it used to seem from the dock to the house. Afore many years I'll be put quietly away, and though I'd prefer bein' beautifully sewed up and launched shipshape in blue water, with a hundred pound weight for to keep me down, I s'poses it won't make much difference, nohow. Anyhow, if I lives as long as old Wiggins, I hopes I may go as well at the end. I don't think I ever told you about him, and if you'll let him fill 'em up ag'in--for it's one of the vartues of hot rum that the more you drinks the thirstier you gits--I'll reel you the yarn right off. "Old Wiggins had been all his life into the Liverpool trade and had got well fixed, so far as cash were consarned; and so when he came for to be seventy or seventy-two years old he were persuaded for to knock off for a full due and spend the balance of his life ashore. Goin' up to some place in Connecticut, he buys hisself a place there and settles down. Well, for a time he were all right, a-fixin' up his house, a-buildin' new barns and hen-coops and fences and the like, and I've heerd tell that the house where he kep' his pigs were better than any dwellin'-house in that region, and the whole place were the wonder of the country roundabout; but arter he had fixed his house all up like a ship, with little staterooms all through the upper part of it, and had got everythin' inside and out in shipshape order, and there weren't nothin' else he could think of for to do, he gits terribly homesick and discontented, and times when he'd come to the city for to collect his sheer of the profits of ships as he had a interest in, he'd sit for hours on the wharf a-watchin' the vessels on the river, and it were like drawin' teeth for to git him to leave and go up to his home. His eyes had giv' out sometime afore he quit the sea, and his legs was shaky, so as he had to walk with a settin' pole, and his hand were tremblin' and unsteady; but aloft he were still all right, and his head were as clear as a bell.