llified him.

He tapped the metal top of the huge knob of his cane and the spring
cover flew open. Ira took a pinch of snuff, inhaled it, closed the
cover of the box, delicately brushed a few flecks of the pungent
powder from his coat lapel and shirt front, and then, burying his
nose in a large silk handkerchief, vented a prodigious:

"_A-choon!_"

Prudence uttered a surprised squeak, like a mouse being stepped on,
jerked herself to a half-standing posture, and the potatoes rolled
to every point of the compass.

"Goodness gracious gallop!" she ejaculated, quite shaken out of her
usual calm. "I should think, Ira, as many times as I've told you
that scares me most into a conniption, that you'd signal me when
you're going to take snuff. I--I'm all of a shake, I be."

"I swan! I'm sorry, Prue. I oughter fire a gun, I allow, before
speakin' the ship."

"Fire a gun!" repeated the old woman, panting as she scrambled for
the potatoes. "That's what I object to, Ira. You want to speak
_this_ ship 'fore you shoot that awful noise. I never can get used
to it."

"There, there!" he said, trying to poke the more distant potatoes
toward her with his cane. He could not himself stoop; or, if he did,
he could only sit erect again after the method of a ratchet wheel.
"I won't do so again, Prudence. I be an onthoughtful critter, if
ever there was one."

Prudence had recovered the last potato. She stopped to pat his ruddy
cheek, nor was it much wrinkled, before she returned to peeling the
potatoes.

"I know you don't mean to, Iry," she crooned. Married couples like
the Balls, where the man has been at home only for brief visits
between voyages, if they really love each other, never grow weary of
the little frills on connubial bliss usually worn shabby by other
people before the honeymoon is past. "I know you don't mean to. But
when you sneeze I think it's the crack o' doom."

"I'm sorry about them potatoes," repeated Cap'n Ira. "I make you a
lot of extry work, Prue. Sometimes I feel, fixed as I be in health,
I oughter be in the Sailors' Snug Harbor over to Paulmouth. I do,
for a fact."

"And what would become of me?" cried the old woman, appalled.

"Well," returned Cap'n Ira, "you couldn't be no worse off than you
be. We'd miss each other a heap, I know."

"Ira!" cried his wife. "Ira, I'd just _die_ without you now that
I've got you to myself at last. Those long years you were away so
much, and us not being blessed with ch