Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters; only no one on board knew how chatty he
could be pen in hand, because the chief engineer had enough imagination
to keep his desk locked. His wife relished his style greatly. They were
a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of
forty, shared with Mr. Rout's toothless and venerable mother a little
cottage near Teddington. She would run over her correspondence, at
breakfast, with lively eyes, and scream out interesting passages in a
joyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the
warning shout, "Solomon says!" She had the trick of firing off
Solomon's utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the
unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations.
On the day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, she
found occasion to remark, "As Solomon says: 'the engineers that go down
to the sea in ships behold the wonders of sailor nature';" when a change
in the visitor's countenance made her stop and stare.

"Solomon. . . . Oh! . . . Mrs. Rout," stuttered the young man, very red
in the face, "I must say . . . I don't. . . ."

"He's my husband," she announced in a great shout, throwing herself
back in the chair. Perceiving the joke, she laughed immoderately with a
handkerchief to her eyes, while he sat wearing a forced smile, and,
from his inexperience of jolly women, fully persuaded that she must
be deplorably insane. They were excellent friends afterwards; for,
absolving her from irreverent intention, he came to think she was a
very worthy person indeed; and he learned in time to receive without
flinching other scraps of Solomon's wisdom.

"For my part," Solomon was reported by his wife to have said once, "give