“You're a good fellow, Staniford!” cried Dunham. “Not at all. I call myself simply a human being, with the elemental instincts of a gentleman, as far as concerns this matter. The girl has been placed in a position which could be made very painful to her. It seems to me it's our part to prevent it from being so. I doubt if she finds it at all anomalous, and if we choose she need never do so till after we've parted with her. I fancy we can preserve her unconsciousness intact.” “Staniford, this is like you,” said his friend, with glistening eyes. “I had some wild notion of the kind myself, but I'm so glad you spoke of it first.” “Well, never mind,” responded Staniford. “We must make her feel that there is nothing irregular or uncommon in her being here as she is. I don't know how the matter's to be managed, exactly; it must be a negative benevolence for the most part; but it can be done. The first thing is to cow that nuisance yonder. Pumping the cabin-boy! The little sot! Look here, Dunham; it's such a satisfaction to me to think of putting that fellow under foot that I'll leave you all the credit of saving the young lady's feelings. I should like to begin stamping on him at once.” “I think you have made a beginning already. I confess I wish you hadn't such heavy nails in your boots!” “Oh, they'll do him good, confound him!” said Staniford. “I should have liked it better if her name hadn't been Blood,” remarked Dunham, presently. “It doesn't matter what a girl's surname is. Besides, Blood is very frequent in some parts of the State.” “She's very pretty, isn't she?” Dunham suggested. “Oh, pretty enough, yes,” replied Staniford. “Nothing is so common as the pretty girl of our nation. Her beauty is part of the general tiresomeness of the whole situation.” “Don't you think,” ventured his friend, further, “that she has rather a lady-like air?” “She wanted to know,” said Staniford, with a laugh. Dunham was silent a while before he asked, “What do you suppose her first name is?” “Jerusha, probably.” “Oh, impossible!” “Well, then,--Lurella. You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these people's minds. I used to see a great deal of their intimate life when I went on my tramps, and chanced it among them, for bed and board, wherever I happened to be. We cultivated Yankees and the raw material seem hardly of the same race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked up that scoundrel.”