and the young woman
what don't get chosen, for witnesses; here's all them white caps
skippin' over the water; and here's this clean stretch of sand. There
couldn't be a better place for a sailor to be married in than jes here.'

"'But I tell you, Sam,' said Abner, a little querulously, 'I didn't come
here to marry one of them women. I didn't start on this trip to make
fast to the fust female person I might fall in with. I set out on a
week's cruise, and I want to see a lot of them afore I make a ch'ice.'

"'I tell you, cap'n,' said Sam, very earnestly, 'it won't do. You might
hang round Thompsontown for a year, and you wouldn't find any two such
women as them two. Here they are, two kinds to pick from: one of them as
ripe as a peach, and the other like a cross between a cricket and a
blossom. And you've got no time to fool away. When the sun goes down
you've got to sail back to Thompsontown, and then one will go one way
and the other another, and where the minister will go to, nobody knows.
They'll all be scattered and out of sight, and this glorious chance
you've got might as well be at the bottom of the sea. Now, cap'n, I tell
you, this thing that's right afore you is what you come for. Jes you
listen to what I say to you: you go to that Mrs. Sickles and let her see
how you're standin' and what your course is. She's no fool, and she can
see the sense of gettin' over a sandbar at high tide jes as well as you
can.'

"Captain Abner hesitated a moment. 'She's a mighty fine woman, Sam,'
said he, 'but if I go and set the case afore her, and she agrees to ship
with me, then I can't ask the other one, and there might as well be no
other one; and she's as pert a little clipper as ever I seed, Sam, and
she likes sailin', that she does.'

"'Now don't you worry about that,' said Sam. 'You jes say all you've got
to say to her, and hear all she's got to say, but don't sign no papers
and take her aboard until you talk to that other girl. Now hurry up, and
walk along the beach a little further off.'

"Without waiting for an answer, Sam Twitty galloped away, or that was
what he would have done had he been a sheep-dog. He darted in between
Mrs. Sickles and her companions; he turned her down the beach; he talked
to her in rapid snaps about the sea, the sky, the sand, and before she
knew it he had driven her alongside of Captain Abner. Then, with what
might have been compared to a bark of satisfaction, he bounced away to
join the ot