s, "whatever is the matter with you?"

"Carn't I be p'lite ef I want to?" roared the captain; but as he
surveyed his contemplated burden, who was a good many inches taller
than he, and by all odds sprightlier, he paled.

"Ef 't you _could_ get anything, Cap'n Kobbe," said his wife, "I sh'd
think you had."

This unblessed dark reminder of a causeless deprivation settled it.
Captain Pharo seized Miss Pray, blushing with alarm and amaze at such
sudden retributive lightning on the part of her long-delayed charms,
and bore her out into the mud.

But he had labored but a few steps with her, giving vent meanwhile to
audible, involuntary groans, before it became evident to her, or to
them both, that his grasp was failing, his feet sinking. She threw up
a hand and partly dislodged his pipe; it was instantly a question of
dropping his pipe or Miss Pray; the captain dropped Miss Pray.

Both women were now angry with him; between all that sea and sky
Captain Pharo appeared not to have a friend save his pipe and me.

Miss Pray indignantly picked the rest of her steps alone. "Ye'll have
to do the rest o' yer co'tin' in yer own way," murmured the captain to
me, darkly and vaguely, as he stepped into the boat: "but my 'dvice to
ye is, drop it! drop it right whar 'tis!"

"Oh, that is all right," I tried to assure him. "I--I hadn't hardly
begun, you know."

We scoured the bottom successfully with the "Eliza Rodgers," but as we
got into deep water there fell a perfect calm.

"'T 'd be bad enough," said Captain Pharo, set against the world, and
tugging wrathfully at the oars, "t' go on sech idjit contractions as
these 'ith a breeze t' set sail to, but when 't comes to pullin' over
thar' twenty mile, with the sea as flat as a floor, t' have yer darn
fool pictur' took----" He laid down the oars with an undoubted air of
permanency, and lit his pipe.

Mrs. Kobbe pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. "Cap'n Pharo Kobbe,
them 't knew you afore ever I was born say as 't you was the best
master of a vessel 't ever sailed, and everybody knows 't you can sail
this coast in the dark, an' though--though you did act queer a little
while ago, I don't--don't like to have you call yourself a da--darn
fool."

Captain Pharo glanced at me with suicidal despair.

Mrs. Kobbe and Miss Pray took out their knitting, with the implicit
Basin superstition of "knitting up a breeze." They as seriously
advised me to "scratch the mast and whistle,"