h the air darted
voices of birds forsaken or on doctor's errands, crying "Phoebe?
Phoebe?" or "Killed he! killed he!"

"Are you a dealer?" asked the gentleman of Jimmy Phoebus.

"Just a little that way," said Jimmy, warily, "when I kin git somethin'
cheap."

The stranger had a pair of keen, dancing eyes, and a long, eloquent,
silver-gray face that might have suited a great general, so fine was
its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a
well, disturbing the mirror there.

"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did that
sound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that's
what brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"

"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.

"Johnson's a great factor hereabout," continued the military-looking
man, bending his handsome eyes on the bay captain, as if there was a
business secret between them, and peering at once mischievously and
nobly; "he makes the quotient to suit. He leaves the suttle large and
never stints the cloff."

"He don't narry a feller down to the cloth he's got, sir?" assented
Jimmy, dubiously.

"Why should he? His equation is simple: I suppose you know what it is."

"Not ezackly," answered Phoebus, pricking up his ears to learn.

"Well, it is force and class sympathy against a dead quantity: laws
which have no consignees, cattle which have no lawyer and no tongue,
rights which have lapsed by their assertion being suspended, till demand
and supply, like a pair of bulldogs, tear what is left to pieces. Armed
with his _ca. sa._, my neighbor Johnson offsets everybody's _fi. fa._,
serves his writ the first, and makes to gentlemen like you a
satisfactory quotient. But he cuts no capers with Isaac and Jacob
Cannon!"

"I expect now that you are Jacob Cannon?" remarked the tawny sailor, not
having understood a word of what preceded. "If that's the case, I'm glad
to know your name, and thank you for givin' me this lift."

By a bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guess
would do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand way,
continued:

"We let neighbor Johnson and his somewhat peculiar mother-in-law make
such commerce as suits him, provided he studies to give us no
inconvenience. That is his equation; with his quotient we have no
concern other than our slight interest in his wastage, as when Madame
Cannon rides down to change a bill and leaves an order for
supplies