the time for the captain's departure approached, had been subsiding into
her old melancholy. "There's other things to think of in this vale of
tears."

"Are there? Well, if they're gloomy, I don't want to think of 'em. Jack,
my lad, I wish you were going to sail with me."

"So do I," said Jack.

"He's my only boy, captain," said Mrs. Harding. "I couldn't part with
him."

"I don't blame you, ma'am, not a particle; though there's the making of
a sailor in Jack."

"If he went away, he'd never come back," said Rachel, lugubriously.

"I don't know about that, ma'am. I've been a sailor, man and boy, forty
years, and here I am, well and hearty to-day."

"The captain is about your age, isn't he, Aunt Rachel?" said Jack,
maliciously.

"I'm only thirty-nine," said Rachel, sharply.

"Then I must have been under a mistake all my life," said the cooper to
himself. "Rachel's forty-seven, if she's a day."

This remark he prudently kept to himself, or a fit of hysterics would
probably have been the result.