wife, in those days, and I felt proud of
her,--natural, with the lads looking on.

"Molly," I used to say, sometimes,--"Molly Madonna!"

"Nonsense!" says she, giving a clack to her needles,--pleased enough
though, I warrant you, and turning a very pretty pink about the cheeks
for a four-years' wife. Seeing as how she was always a lady to me, and a
true one, and a gentle, though she wasn't much at manners or
book-learning, and though I never gave her a silk gown in her life, she
was quite content, you see, and so was I.

I used to speak my thought about the name sometimes, when the lads
weren't particularly noisy, but they laughed at me mostly. I was rough
enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as
the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little
different from the others. "Jake's poetry," they called 'em.

We were loading for the East Shore trade, as I said, didn't I? There
isn't much of the genuine, old-fashioned trade left in these days,
except the whiskey branch, which will be brisk, I take it, till the
Malagasy carry the prohibitory law by a large majority in both houses.
We had a little whiskey in the hold, I remember, that trip, with a good
stock of knives, red flannel, handsaws, nails, and cotton. We were
hoping to be at home again within the year. We were well provisioned,
and Dodd,--he was the cook,--Dodd made about as fair coffee as you're
likely to find in the galley of a trader. As for our officers, when I
say the less said of them the better, it ain't so much that I mean to be
disrespectful as that I mean to put it tenderly. Officers in the
merchant service, especially if it happens to be the African service,
are brutal men quite as often as they ain't (at least, that's my
experience; and when some of your great ship-owners argue the case with
me,--as I'm free to say they have done before now,--I say, "That's
_my_ experience, sir," which is all I've got to say);--brutal men, and
about as fit for their positions as if they'd been imported for the
purpose a little indirect from Davy Jones's Locker. Though they do say
that the flogging is pretty much done away with in these days, which
makes a difference.

Sometimes on a sunshiny afternoon, when the muddy water showed a little
muddier than usual, on account of the clouds being the color of silver,
and all the air the color of gold, when the oily barrels were knocking
about on the wharves, and the smells were