Group altogether and going back to the Kingsmills, or even
further, and how Henderson and Macfarlane were going to put on a steamer
and run us all out. He tied up the _Peep o' Day_ at a hundred and forty
dollars a week and nothing coming in, making the excuse she was foul and
the copper needing cleaning; and when you saw nothing doing and asked
why, he flared up and said you could go to hell! And all this, if you
please, for the privilege of seeing Afiola sailing up to the Mission
house and being honored guest, and Mrs. Tweedie smiling her prettiest,
_vice_ Elijah Coe, fired! We fully thought he'd backslide onto
square-face and female society, but, if anything, he grew more
missionary than ever, and nearly lammed the life out of Freddy Rice for
speaking disrespectful of the Virgin Mary! You see, Coe's religion,
being as it was Mrs. Tweedie, didn't make no proper distinction between
sects, and he just stood up for anybody who had his name in the Bible!

Then thinking, I dessay, that absence makes the heart grow fonder, he
went to sea again and put in a spell of two months about the Group; and
when he got back he dressed up in his best with a red silk handkerchief
around his neck, sailor fashion, and a crimson sash and patent-leather
shoes, and the rest of him white drill, and went a-calling on the
Mission house to see if he couldn't break into society again. But there
was a wicked streak in Mrs. Tweedie, for all her pretty face and golden
hair, and being too good a woman to love anybody but her husband, she
found a queer kind of satisfaction in hating Coe, or pretending like she
did, and driving him half-mad with the things she said to him. She
regularly led on the captain to admit he loved her, and then jumped on
him with both her little feet for saying it, till the poor fellar
stumbled out of the house feeling he had disgraced himself awful and was
never to come back no more.

She wrote him letters afterwards on scented pink paper, which made him
spend days and days with his head leaning on the cabin table, wanting
the worsted dog back, and the canary, and saying she would tell her
husband; and then saying he might keep them and she wouldn't! If he had
treated her just like a Kanaka girl who was dead stuck on him, I guess
he would have found out that women are much the same, whether with
golden hair or coal-black, and that there is much the same colored devil
in every one of them. But to Coe, Alethea Tweedie wasn't no