e idea that he wasn't so very much impressed by my intimacy
with so renowned a character as Sailor Ben. Perhaps Pepper was a little
jealous. At any rate, he refused to go with us to the house.

Captain Nutter was at home reading the Rivermouth Barnacle. He was
a reader to do an editor's heart good; he never skipped over an
advertisement, even if he had read it fifty times before. Then the paper
went the rounds of the neighborhood, among the poor people, like the
single portable eye which the three blind crones passed to each other in
the legend of King Acrisius. The Captain, I repeat, was wandering in
the labyrinths of the Rivermouth Barnacle when I led Sailor Ben into the
sitting-room.

My grandfather, whose inborn courtesy knew no distinctions, received
my nautical friend as if he had been an admiral instead of a common
forecastle-hand. Sailor Ben pulled an imaginary tuft of hair on his
forehead, and bowed clumsily. Sailors have a way of using their forelock
as a sort of handle to bow with.

The old tar had probably never been in so handsome an apartment in all
his days, and nothing could induce him to take the inviting mahogany
chair which the Captain wheeled out from the corner.

The abashed mariner stood up against the wall, twirling his tarpaulin
in his two hands and looking extremely silly. He made a poor show in a
gentleman's drawing-room, but what a fellow he had been in his day, when
the gale blew great guns and the topsails wanted reefing! I thought of
him with the Mexican squadron off Vera Cruz, where,

'The rushing battle-bolt sung from the three-decker out of the foam,'

and he didn't seem awkward or ignoble to me, for all his shyness.

As Sailor Ben declined to sit down, the Captain did not resume his seat;
so we three stood in a constrained manner until my grandfather went to
the door and called to Kitty to bring in a decanter of Madeira and two
glasses.

"My grandson, here, has talked so much about you," said the Captain,
pleasantly, "that you seem quite like an old acquaintance to me."

"Thankee, sir, thankee," returned Sailor Ben, looking as guilty as if he
had been detected in picking a pocket.

"And I'm very glad to see you, Mr.--Mr.--"

"Sailor Ben," suggested that worthy.

"Mr. Sailor Ben," added the Captain, smiling. "Tom, open the door,
there's Kitty with the glasses."

I opened the door, and Kitty entered the room bringing the things on
a waiter, which she was about to set on the