We selectmen talked the thing over going home, but Cap'n Benijah didn't
speak till we was turning in at his gate. Then he fetched his knee a
thump with his fist, and says he, in the most disgusted tone ever I
heard:

"A house and lot for nothing," he says, "a wife to do the work for him,
and five hundred dollars to spend! Sometimes the way this world's run
gives me moral indigestion."

Which was tolerable radical for a Come-Outer to say, seems to me.





JONESY


'Twas Peter T. Brown that suggested it, you might know. And, as likewise
you might know, 'twas Cap'n Jonadab that done the most of the growling.

"They ain't no sense in it, Peter," says he. "Education's all right in
its place, but 'tain't no good out of it. Why, one of my last voyages
in the schooner Samuel Emory, I had a educated cook, feller that had
graduated from one of them correspondence schools. He had his diploma
framed and hung up on the wall of the galley along with tintypes of two
or three of his wives, and pictures cut out of the Police News, and the
like of that. And cook! Why, say! one of the fo'mast hands ate half a
dozen of that cook's saleratus biscuit and fell overboard. If he hadn't
been tangled up in his cod line, so we could haul him up by that, he'd