"It's 'es-teemed lady'" he admonished the captain. "You said 'steamed.'
M'lissy ain't cooked. An' you stutter yet when you come to that word
right after painful. Can't you say it plainer?"

"'Trep-trep-trepidation,'" stammered the captain again. "Say it
yourself," he dared Abner. "I'll bet you can't do no better."

"I ain't tryin' to say it," Abner reminded him with dignity.
"If I was I'd make it out someway. I wouldn't be beat by any word
ever put in a dictionary. You're doin' better," he complimented the
captain, after the sixth recital. "Mebbe you'll git it after awhile."

But when Captain Enoch felt that his monitor was most needed and had
begun to look hopefully forward to a one hundred per cent rehearsal,
Abner took a sudden notion to go sword fishing.

"The time to go sword fishin' is when sword fish are due," he
insisted with Solomonic wisdom. "I'm going to be off Nantucket
shoals by daybreak to-morrow."

"But how be I goin' to git along without you to boost me on that
proposal?" demanded the captain. "If you had any feelin' at all, you
wouldn't leave me just when I need you most."

Abner considered the situation for some moments.

"I got it," he declared joyfully. "Buy a phonygraft an' some blank
records an' keep sayin' that proposal just the same as you do to me.
You can hear yourself poppin' as plain as you can hear a bell buoy
ring-in'. It takes me to plan things," he added with becoming pride.