when you don't know
on 't, you dove of doves!"

She bent her eyes upon him in tender inquiry, in answer to which he
said, "At last it is, sweetheart, for you don't know that I loved you
when I was a youngster not more 'n a dozen year old!"

"Loved _me_, captain! It isn't creditable! Tell me all about it. Are you
sure?"

"Just as sure on 't as I be of anything; just as sure as I be that I
love you now."

"Tell me all about it, I'm dying to know; it seems like some wild
novelty, to be sure."

"Yes, you're right, it is like a novelty if it was only writ out, and it
don't seem creditable, but it's true; I'm just as sure on 't as I be of
anything,--just as sure as I be that I love you now!"

"O captain!"

"Yes, my own Rose, I loved you when I was a little lad,--loved you just
as I did the mornin' star,--loved you and worshipped you from far away.
What a spry little thing you was, a-hoppin' about among the mahogany and
walnut stuff like a young sparrer! O, how I've watched and follered you
with my eyes when you didn't dream on 't!"

"But, John, my nerves are a woman's, remember, and you mustn't keep them
a-strain so long; they're wery much weakened by all this."

"Ay, to be sure," says John; "your nerves be a woman's, to say nothin'
of your curosity bein' a woman's!"

And he laughed with as much heartiness at her expense as though she had
been his wife already.

"John!" This with tender reproach, and he resumed, in a tone of
respectful and lover-like humility.

"Wa'n't your name Rose Rollins afore you was jined to the
vagabond,--wagabond, that is to say,--afore you was dethroned; and
didn't you live in Fust Street, opposite them old tenement housen knowed
as Baker's Row?"

"Of course I did, John, in the yaller brick with the shop in the corner,
and the entrance embellished with a beautiful sign,--three coffins, with
their leds turned back so as to reweal the satin linin's, and my
father's name in letters that represented silver screws! A stroke of
genius that design was!--the sign of the three coffins, two of them
sideways and one end; my father's name--Farewell Rollins, wery
appropriate to his business as it turned out--in letters that they was
modelled after silver screws."

"Three on 'em, two sideways and one end?" says John; "and the name,
Farewell Rollins, shaped arter silver screws! Why, as you be a livin'
cretur, you're the very--wery--little gal I was in love with; and many a
day, dark enough other