"However, you got married?"

"Yes, I did. More fool I! If I had known anything, I should have waited
five years at least. I didn't have any one to tell me so. My father and
mother were both dead."

"Think you'd have listened to 'em if they had been alive and had told
you? However, however, that's all to one side. Well, Albert's havin' no
money to speak of is an objection--and a good honest one from your point
of view. His prospects here in this business of mine are fair, and he
is doin' better at it than he was, so he may make a comf'table livin'--a
comf'table South Harniss livin', that is--by and by."

"Oh, he is with you, then? Oh, yes, I remember my wife said he worked in
your office. But she said more about his being some sort of a--a poet,
wasn't it?"

For the first time since the interview began the captain looked ill at
ease and embarrassed.

"Thunderation!" he exclaimed testily, "you mustn't pay attention to
that. He does make up poetry' pieces--er--on the side, as you might say,
but I keep hopin' all the time he'll grow out of it, give him time. It
'ain't his regular job, you mustn't think 'tis."

The visitor laughed again. "I'm glad of that," he said, "both for your
sake and mine. I judge that you and I, Snow, are in complete agreement
as far as our opinion of poetry and that sort of stuff is concerned.
Of course I'm not condemning all poetry, you understand. Longfellow and
Tennyson and the regular poets are all right. You understand what I'm
getting at?"

"Sartin. I used to know 'Down went the R'yal George with all her crew
complete,' and a lot more. Used to say 'em over to myself when I first
went to sea and stood watch alone nights. But they were different, you
know; they--they--"

"Sure! My wife--why, I give you my word that my own wife and her set
go perfectly daffy over chaps who write stuff that rhymes and that the
papers are printing columns about. Snow, if this grandson of yours was
a genuine press-touted, women's club poet instead of a would-be--well,
I don't know what might happen. In that case she might be as strong FOR
this engagement as she is now against it."

He paused, seeming a bit ashamed of his own heat. Captain Zelotes,
however, regarded him with more approval than he had yet shown.

"It's been my observation that women are likely to get off the course
chasin' false signals like that," he observed. "When a man begins
lettin' his hair and his mouth run wild together seems as if