;
Hooray, my boys, hooray!
A bully ship and a bully crew;
Good-bye, fare y' well.
A bucko mate an' a skipper too;
Hooray, my boys, we're home'ard bound!'"

For the old maid this was the time the ages had been waiting for. What
anxious nights she spent upon her pillow or before the looking-glass;
what former triumphs she reviewed; and what plans for the conquest
she had made, shall still remain unwritten history. When she was
ready to appear, we used to hear her nervous call, "Doctor! Can
I come over?" Poor old maid! She couldn't even wait till she was
asked. How patiently she stirred the hot tomato soy the captain made;
O yes! She could be useful and domestic. How tenderly she leaned upon
the arm of the captain's chair, caressing the scar upon his head
"where he was shanghaied!" Then, like Othello, he would entertain
her with his story about the ladies in the sea-shell clothes, or of
the time when he had "weathered the Horn" in a "sou'wester." She was
flurried and excited all the week. The climax came after the captain
left for Iligan. The old maid learned somehow that he was going to
Manila on a transport which would pass by Oroquieta but a few miles
out. Sending a telegram to the chief quartermaster whom she called a
"dear," she said that if the ship would stop to let her on, she could
go out to meet it in a _banca_. Though the schoolmaster and his wife
had also requested transportation on the same boat, the old maid,
evidently thinking that "three made a crowd," wired to her friend
the quartermaster not to take them on.

We met the old maid almost in hysterics on the road to Lobuc. "O, for
the love of God!" she cried, "get me a boat, and get my trunk down
to the shore. I have about ten minutes left to catch that ship." It
was old Ichabod who rowed her out in the canoe--the old maid, with
the sun now broken out behind the clouds, her striped parasol, and a
small steamer trunk. It was a mad race for old Ichabod, and they were
pretty well drenched when the old maid climbed aboard the transport,
breathless but triumphant. I have since learned that Dido won her
wandering AEneas in Manila, and that the captain finally has found his
"bucko mate."

It was old Ichabod's delight to teach a class of sorry-looking
_senoritas_, with their dusty toes stuck into carpet slippers, and
their hair combed back severely on their heads. The afternoons he
spent in visiting his flock; we