"O Captain Sands!" said I, there being a convenient pause, "you were
speaking of your wife just now; did you ask her if she saw the shower?"

"First thing she spoke of when I got into the house. 'There,' says she,
'I was afraid you wouldn't see the rain coming in time, and I had my
heart in my mouth when it began to thunder. I thought you'd get soaked
through, and be laid up for a fortnight,' says she. 'I guess a summer
shower won't hurt an old sailor like me,' says I." And the captain
reached for another piece of his kelp-stalk, and whittled away more
busily than ever. Kate took out her knife and also began to cut kelp,
and I threw pebbles in the hope of hitting a spider which sat
complacently on a stone not far away, and when he suddenly vanished
there was nothing for me to do but to whittle kelp also.

"Do you suppose," said Kate, "that Mrs. Sands really made you know about
that shower?"

The captain put on his most serious look, coughed slowly, and moved
himself a few inches nearer us, along the boat. I think he fully
understood the importance and solemnity of the subject. "It ain't for us
to say what we do know or don't, for there's nothing sartain, but I made
up my mind long ago that there's something about these p'ints that's
myster'ous. My wife and me will be sitting there to home and there won't
be no word between us for an hour, and then of a sudden we'll speak up
about the same thing. Now the way I view it, she either puts it into my
head or I into hers. I've spoke up lots of times about something, when I
didn't know what I was going to say when I began, and she'll say she was
just thinking of that. Like as not you have noticed it sometimes? There
was something my mind was dwellin' on yesterday, and she come right out
with it, and I'd a good deal rather she hadn't," said the captain,