"She wanted to know," said Staniford, with a laugh.

Dunham was silent a while before he asked, "What do you suppose
her first name is?"

"Jerusha, probably."

"Oh, impossible!"

"Well, then,--Lurella. You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these
people's minds. I used to see a great deal of their intimate life when
I went on my tramps, and chanced it among them, for bed and board,
wherever I happened to be. We cultivated Yankees and the raw material
seem hardly of the same race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of
the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy
heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to
something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and
the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes,
and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the
captain picked up that scoundrel."

The turn of Staniford's thought to Hicks was suggested by the
appearance of Captain Jenness, who now issued from the cabin gangway,
and came toward them with the shadow of unwonted trouble in his face.
The captain, too, was smoking.

"Well, gentlemen," he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man
not used to diplomacy, "how do you like your accommodations?"