but when you
address my wife--"

"Your WIFE?" hollers everybody--everybody but the cap'n; he only sort of
gurgled.

"My wife," says Asaph. "When you men--church members, too, some of
you--sold the house over her head, I'm proud to say that I, having a
home once more, was able to step for'ard and ask her to share it with
me. We was married a few minutes ago," he says.

"And, oh, Cap'n Poundberry!" cried Debby, looking as if this was the
most wonderful part of it--"oh, Cap'n Poundberry!" she says, "we've
known for a long time that some man--an uncommon kind of man--was coming
to offer me a home some day, but even Asaph didn't know 'twas himself;
did you, Asaph?"

We selectmen talked the thing over going home, but Cap'n Benijah didn't
speak till we was turning in at his gate. Then he fetched his knee a
thump with his fist, and says he, in the most disgusted tone ever I
heard:

"A house and lot for nothing," he says, "a wife to do the work for him,
and five hundred dollars to spend! Sometimes the way this world's run
gives me moral indigestion."

Which was tolerable radical for a Come-Outer to say, seems to me.

JONESY

'Twas Peter T. Brown that suggested it, you might know. And, as likewise
you might know, 'twas Cap'n Jonadab that done the most of the growling.

"They ain't no sense in it, Peter," says he. "Education's all right in
its place, but 'tain't no good out of it. Why, one of my last voyages
in the schooner Samuel Emory, I had a educated cook, feller that had
graduated from one of them correspondence schools. He had his diploma
framed and hung up on the wall of the galley along with tintypes of two
or three of his wives, and pictures cut out of the Police News, and the
like of that. And cook! Why, say! one of the fo'mast hands ate half a
dozen of that cook's saleratus biscuit and fell overboard. If he hadn't
been tangled up in his cod line, so we could haul him up by that, he'd
have been down yet. He'd never have riz of his own accord, not with them
biscuits in him. And as for his pie! the mate ate one of them bakeshop
paper plates one time, thinking 'twas under crust; and he kept sayin'
how unusual tender 'twas, at that. Now, what good was education to that
cook? Why--"

"Cut it out!" says Peter T., disgusted. "Who's talking about cooks?
These fellers ain't cooks--they're--"

"I know. They're waiters. Now, there 'tis again. When I give an order
and there's any back talk, I want to underst