So Captain Bartlet signed on another cabin boy, and arrangements were made for Lis to join the ship in Boston, the night before her sailing. He was to leave Nantucket on a fishing-boat belonging to a neighbor of theirs, another Captain Joy—brother to the _Narwhal’s_ master—which was bound for Boston at the end of the week, with a cargo of fish for the city markets. Captain Bartlet himself, was going on the morrow, but Lis would need a few days to get his sea-going outfit together, before starting out in his new life. The next four days before his departure were busy ones in the two Folger households. Miss Charity brought her sewing basket over to her sister-in-law’s, and helped in the work of altering such things as had been already purchased for Tommy, to Lister’s use. Though the two boys were so alike that strangers were constantly taking one for the other, Tommy was slightly broader in the shoulders than his twin—just enough difference to make certain takings-in necessary in fitting the clothes of one to the other. Erica would have been pressed into service also, but her clumsiness with her needle was too well known to both aunts to make her help desirable. As Miss Charity phrased it in exasperation, she only “made double work when she put on a thimble. It took one person to rip out her stitches, and a second to replace them properly.” Miss Charity had labored long and hard with this hoydenish young niece who was so mortifyingly unlike the other girls of her age and community. She even felt dimly that in some way it reflected unfavorably upon herself, that she could not, no matter how diligently she tried, teach her charge to be a “little lady” like the daughters of her island neighbors. But in another way Erica managed to be of very real help, by constituting herself nurse and general entertainer for Tommy, and thus setting his mother free for more immediate duties. Tommy was finding it pretty hard to lie there in bed, day after day, unable to move his trussed-up leg or even to turn over without assistance. He had never been fond of reading, and now books seemed a rather contemptible substitute to offer an energetic, lively boy, for the glorious adventure of that lost voyage to China, in the _Spray_. Still, he graciously allowed Erica to read aloud to him on occasions, when her inventive faculty at devising other amusements ran temporarily dry. But the books of that period intended for boys, which could be found in either of the Folger houses, were such very mild, unexciting narratives, that the readings usually ended in both Erica’s and Tommy’s yawning desperately together and flinging the disappointing volume aside.